Washington Post
July 9, 2022
TOKYO — The man accused of assassinating former Japanese leader Shinzo Abe on Friday told investigators he believed that Abe was linked to a religious group he blamed for his mother’s financial woes. On Sunday, a Tokyo-based representative of the Family Federation for World Peace and Unification, which in Japan was formerly named the Japan Unification Church, confirmed that the man’s mother is a member.
The suspect’s mother remains a member but has not shown up to recent gatherings, said the representative, who was reached at the Tokyo office phone number but refused to be named, citing privacy reasons amid the ongoing criminal investigation. Police have declined to name the religious organization cited by the suspect.
Details about the gunman’s motives are under probe, but the official’s confirmation Sunday added another piece to the puzzle that is coming together in the aftermath of Abe’s assassination at Friday’s campaign event in Nara, east of Osaka, which rocked a country where gun violence is almost unheard of.
The assassination appears to have resulted in a rally-around-the-flag effect for Abe’s ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP). While LDP was expected to maintain its majority in the upper house, early results Sunday showed it was poised to pick up enough seats to secure a two-thirds supermajority in the parliament along with its coalition party.
The overwhelming victory would usher in at least three years of political stability for Prime Minister Fumio Kishida, also of the LDP. It would clear the way for Kishida to enact some of the party’s most controversial goals, including increasing defense spending and pursuing Abe’s long-running desire to amend Japan’s pacifist post-war constitution so that Japan can become a stronger global military power.
“When they get ahold of these ‘golden three years’ the focus will be on what the Kishida administration will hammer out,” said Yu Uchiyama, Japanese politics professor at the University of Tokyo Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. “If the Kishida administration can come up with policies that appeal to the people, there is a strong possibility that the administration will last long-term.”
A two-thirds supermajority is required for a constitutional revision, which the LDP said it would make a priority.
“We want to further the debate on constitutional revision, so that we would be able to carry forward with the draft proposal” in the parliament, Kishida said in an interview with public broadcaster NHK as votes were counted.
But Kishida faces domestic pressures: a plummeting yen, inflation and energy price hikes. He has yet to release details of a vague economic overhaul plan. Yet the LDP successfully messaged to voters that their woes were the result of external factors — such as the Russian invasion of Ukraine — rather than the LDP’s leadership flaws, experts said.
National security weighed heavily on Japanese voters’ minds, polls showed, along with the war, concerns over China’s threats to Taiwan, and North Korea’s developing nuclear program.
Sunday’s election took place as the nation reeled from Abe’s assassination. In Nara, where Abe was killed, a long line of supporters waited throughout the day to show their respects. Before LDP officials counted their votes for the night, they spent a moment of silence in memory of Abe.
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken announced Sunday he would make an unscheduled stop after his meetings with world leaders in Southeast Asia to pay respects to Abe. Blinken is set to depart Bangkok for Tokyo on Sunday night local time. The State Department did not specify which officials Blinken will meet while he is in Tokyo.
Kei Sato, the Liberal Democratic Party politician from Nara for whom Shinzo Abe was stumping on Friday when he was shot and killed, won reelection tonight. He said he will pay respects to Abe at the wake tomorrow and deliver the news of his victory.
The suspect, 41-year-old Tetsuya Yamagami of Nara, told investigators that he shot Abe because he believed Abe was linked to a group he hated.
Japanese media, citing police sources, subsequently reported that Yamagami told investigators that it was a religious group to which his mother donated money. Yamagami told investigators that his mother had become bankrupt after the donations, according to the Japanese newspaper Mainichi Shimbun, which cited police sources. He said his family fell apart because of his mother’s obsession with the group, and he targeted Abe “out of resentment,” the newspaper reported.
The church representative contacted by The Washington Post Sunday said that he did not have information about the mother’s donations, and that the organization is reviewing donations she may have made to the Nara branch. The Nara branch and the Nara police could not immediately be reached by phone on Sunday. The church official identified the suspect’s mother as Yoko Yamagami.
It is unclear whether Yoko Yamagami was a member of multiple religious organizations. Japanese news reports said Tetsuya Yamagami had wanted to kill the leader of a religious group that investigators declined to name. He decided to target Abe instead, police said.
The Family Federation for World Peace and Unification is the name of the controversial organization known as the Unification Church, which is now controlled by the widow of the Rev. Sun Myung Moon.
The U.S. office of the Unification Church said in a statement Saturday that the group condemned the violence and that “guns have no place in our religious beliefs or practices.”
“The Family Federation for World Peace and Unification (commonly known as the “Unification Church”) would like to express our shock and grief over the assassination of the former Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe. Our thoughts and prayers are with his family in the wake of this tragedy,” the statement read.
Abe, like many other world leaders including former U.S. president Donald Trump, appeared at Unification Church-related events as a paid speaker. Most recently, he spoke on a September 2021 program via video link.
The Unification Church is among many relatively new religions that are active in Japan. The organization’s members have provided a reliable base of staunchly conservative voters for Japan’s conservative ruling party, the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), of which Abe was a member, said Jeffrey J. Hall, an expert on nationalist activism at the Kanda University of International Studies.
“They’re not the only bloc of voters who are religious and conservative voting for the LDP, but they are one of them,” Hall said.
The LDP headquarters could not immediately be reached by phone on Sunday.
A police investigation is underway into the suspect’s motives, the homemade weapon he allegedly used, and the security protocols in place at the Nara event.
John Hudson in Bangkok contributed to this report.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/07/09/shinzo-abe-assassination-election-blinken/
No comments:
Post a Comment