Colby Cosh: Shinzo Abe’s assassination spotlights predatory religious sect’s ties to Japanese government

There must be other readers, I think, who have been keeping one eye on the aftermath of the July 8 assassination of former Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe, shot dead on a street while campaigning for his Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) in a national election. Abe was killed with a homemade firearm by what seemed to have been a classic lone wacko full of delusions.

At any rate, that was a natural assumption for us western dilettantes to make. Our imaginations are haunted by the determined lone gunman fuelled by contrived grievances, personal troubles and obsessive research into shadowy conspiracies. Abe’s death reminded us that such a person can appear even in a high-trust, close-knit, fully disarmed, explicitly pacifistic society — one of the safest and most orderly civilizations that can be identified on this planet. (The killer, Tetsuya Yamagami, didn’t just make his own gun; he manufactured his own gunpowder and shells.)

But if you’ve been following the story, you know the implications are much weirder than that. A translator in Tokyo, Dylan Levi King, has written an excellent, unnerving primer on the aftermath of the assassination. It turned out, unsurprisingly, that Yamagami, 41, was a troubled person who had drifted from job to job and been more or less constantly broke. But the other elements of the “lone nut” jigsaw puzzle don’t snap very cleanly into place.

Yamagami, a veteran of Japan’s military, had struggled to support his mother and siblings because the Unification Church (UC), the Korean-based religious sect founded by the Rev. Sun Myung Moon, had gotten its hooks into her. The church, which is very active in Japan, had extracted something in the neighbourhood of $1 million in donations from her, driving her into bankruptcy and perpetual penury. She had given them the proceeds of her late husband’s life insurance and the price of the family home.

It’s part of a broader “spiritual sales” problem, an issue of unchecked religious charlatanry, that had gone largely uncontrolled and uncommented on in Japan. And when Yamagami began to explore that rabbit hole, he found that the church really was protected by deep, pervasive ties to the LDP.

It wasn’t misinformation that drove him round the bend, you see; it was accurate information that had been informally suppressed. Yamagami decided to target Abe, once the chosen scion of the LDP, because he had constantly given aid and comfort to the Unification Church — and received vital political support in exchange. This is, as King observes, a statement of flat fact:

“During Abe’s years of ascendency, Unification Church personnel helped staff his electoral campaigns and local office in the city of Shimonoseki, where he had inherited his father’s power base. The Unification Church’s local office stood directly across from the one occupied by Abe himself, and members came and went freely. When it came election time, Unification Church members manned phone banks.

“As Abe climbed the political ladder, the Unification Church stayed by his side: the eighty-thousand votes that the group guaranteed in 2006 propelled him to the office of Prime Minister. Documents from the Unification Church seem to confirm this, recording Sun Myung Moon personally dispatching his staffers to make contact with key Abe faction members.

“Meanwhile, the mainstream media in Japan was largely unwilling to run stories linking politicians to the Unification Church.… When Yamagami’s actions finally raised questions about LDP-Unification Church relations in 2022, half of the LDP members sitting in the House of Representatives turned out to have connections to the group.”

King remarks (gloomily!) that “a lone gunman rarely shifts the course of history,” but Yamagami has surely already made it twitch a little. When LDP Prime Minister Fumio Kishida was re-elected in August and formed a new cabinet, there was a modest purge of ministers most closely associated with the Unification Church. This process is ongoing as the mainstream Japanese media plays catchup with a story long hiding in plain sight.

The powerful LDP figure Taro Kono, titular minister of “digital affairs,” has basically been made what Americans would call a “spiritual sales czar,” forming a consultative committee of UC critics who went ignored before Abe’s death. The church itself may be facing a finance crisis, and there are calls to have its legal status in Japan revoked. And in December, the Diet passed laws forbidding what amounts to a grocery list of the UC’s prior unethical practices, including binding contracts for spiritual “services,” intimidation of donors and inducing donors to sell family assets. As the detained Yamagami awaits his fate, Japan faces an awkward question: would any of this had happened if his aim had been worse?

National Post
Twitter.com/colbycosh

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