The church linked to Abe’s killing, Japan’s political troubles

Controversy erupts after Shinzo Abe’s assassin says he killed the former leader over his support for a ‘predatory South Korean religious cult’.

Shinzo Abe was not his assassin’s preferred target.

Investigators say Tetsuya Yamagami, who fatally shot Japan’s longest-serving prime minister on July 8, had initially wanted to kill the leader of the Unification Church — a South-Korean religious sect that the 41-year-old blames for his family’s financial ruin. But the COVID-19 pandemic got in the way.

Hak Ja Han Moon, who has led the church since the 2012 death of its founder — her husband Sun Myung Moon — had stopped coming to Japan following pandemic-related border closures.

In a letter Yamagami sent to a blogger a day before shooting Abe with a handmade gun, he wrote that it was “impossible” to kill Hak Ja Han Moon. And although Abe was “not my original enemy”, the 67-year-old politician was “one of the most influential sympathizers” of the Unification Church, he wrote. “I can no longer afford to think about the political implications and consequences that Abe’s death will bring,” he added.

The brazen killing in the city of Nara, as Abe was delivering a campaign speech, shocked Japan, a nation where political violence and gun crimes are extremely rare. Prime Minister Fumio Kishida quickly declared that he would hold a state funeral for Abe while the Japanese public handed his ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) a sweeping victory in an upper house election held just days after the assassination.

But the grief quickly gave way to anger amid growing media scrutiny of the church’s extensive ties with Abe and the LDP, and alleged abuses, including claims of forced donations. Kishida has, meanwhile, seen his approval ratings plunge from 63 percent at the time of Abe’s assassination to about 29 percent in mid-September, raising questions over the prime minister’s political future.

Agencies