On the evening of July 8th, at 5:03 PM, Former Prime Minister of Japan Shinzo Abe passed away in Nara Medical University Hospital after being shot in the neck and chest earlier that day.

Abe was shot while giving a campaign speech to garner support for his political party, the Liberal Democratic Party of Japan, in the city of Nara (located just outside of the Osaka metropolitan area). In the middle of his speech, a former Maritime Self Defense Forces officer by the name of Tetsuya Yamagami snuck up behind him and shot him twice, before being tackled by plainclothes police and arrested. The use of a gun to perform the assassination stunned many onlookers and observers within Japan, where civilian ownership of guns is extremely low due to harsh gun laws. The weapon used on Abe appears to be homemade by the gunman.

The assassin, Tetsuya Yamagami, confessed to the crime upon his apprehension and after some contemplation, finally told police that his motive was due to Yamagami believing that former Prime Minister Abe was connected to a religious group known as the “Family Federation for World Peace and Unity”, better known as the Unification Church. Yamagami’s mother was a devoted member of the Unification Church who donated a great deal of money to them, forcing her to go bankrupt. Yamagami decided to take revenge by assassinating Shinzo Abe, who he believed was connected to the group. He originally planned to assassinate a Unification Church leader, but later decided to switch targets. He admitted that he had been planning the assassination for some time, since at least last year.

Yamagami has clearly stated that the motive for his assassination was not political.

Shinzo Abe was the longest serving Prime Minister of Japan, having held the office twice in his lifetime- once from 2006 to 2007 and again from 2012 to 2020. Abe was certainly not an outsider to Japanese politics, being born into somewhat of a political dynasty. His father and maternal grandmother were both Prime Ministers, while his paternal grandfather was a foreign affairs minister.

Despite coming from a long line of influential political figures, the legacy of Abe’s family is deeply complicated. Abe’s grandfather and former Prime Minister Nobusuke Kishi was an official in the Japanese Imperial government during World War 2 and was detained after the war as a Class A war criminal by American occupation forces. The US government eventually decided to release Kishi due to his strongly anticommunist stances and allowed him to continue his political career to ebb the spread of Communism in Japan. Kishi then went on to create the conservative and nationalist Liberal Democratic Party that Abe himself was a member of. Japan has been ruled by the Liberal Democratic Party since the 1950s, with few exceptions throughout its history.

Abe himself was not exempt from political controversy. In fact, during his time as Prime Minister, he made at least two visits to the Yasukuni Shrine in Japan, a controversial war memorial in Japan. The shrine, which was originally built under Emperor Meiji to honor those killed during wars in Japan, has been altered to also honor convicted war criminals captured during or after World War 2. Among those enshrined there is former General Hideki Tojo, the Prime Minister of Japan during World War 2 who was sentenced to death by a US led military tribunal following the war for his role in several atrocities committed during the war, alongside other notorious Japanese war criminals. Despite the extremely controversial reputation of the shrine, shrine organizers do stress that many civilians are also enshrined at the temple along with military leaders.

Shinzo Abe was also a member of the Nippon Kaigi organization, a far-right and ultranationalist organization that lobbies politicians to reinterpret Japan’s constitution to allow Japan to officially re-arm. The group has also lobbied to have mentions of Imperial Japan’s war crimes during World War 2 removed from school textbooks.

As for the detained Yamagami, it is unclear what will happen next. The Nara District Prosecutor’s Office has stated that they believe that he was operating rationally and according to his own will, and not out of some psychiatric condition- and as a consequence is fit to stand trial. However, Yamagami is still set to be psychologically evaluated before his trial to ensure that he is competent enough to do so. Yamagami is expected to receive life in prison due to the overwhelming amount of evidence against him as well as Japan’s astonishingly high conviction rate. In Japan, the maximum penalty for murder is death- but since Yamagami only had one victim, this is not expected to be his punishment.