Shinzo Abe Killing Suspect Wanted Revenge—Against His Mother’s Church, #Shinzo #Abe #Killing #Suspect #Wanted #RevengeAgainst #Mothers #Church Welcome to O L A S M E D I A TV N E W S, This is what we have for you today:
NARA, Japan—
Tetsuya Yamagami
vowed to take revenge on the church he said had ruined his family and deserved to be exposed before the world. He had a weapon in mind, one that he would have to fashion himself in Japan.
“It’s strange how desperately I want a gun,” he wrote in December 2020, in an anonymous comment on a blog critical of the religious group long known as the Unification Church. Only later—too late—would Mr. Yamagami unmask himself as the writer of the comment.
Little by little, Mr. Yamagami crafted his weapon in his one-room apartment with industrial tools, police say. He practiced shooting on a mountainside and weighed whom he would target. After considering the family of the late church founder, the Rev. Moon Sun-myung, he settled on a world leader he believed was tied to the church.
His quest for revenge would end 2½ miles away from the apartment, on a busy street in this city.
When Tetsuya Yamagami was arrested at the scene of Shinzo Abe’s shooting, he was carrying a crude handmade gun.
Photo:
Associated Press
Family Turmoil
Tetsuya Yamagami was born on Sept. 10, 1980, and grew up in Nara, an ancient capital of Japan in the megalopolis surrounding Osaka.
Much of what is known about his early life comes from Mr. Yamagami’s uncle—his father’s older brother—who is a 77-year-old retired lawyer. The uncle, in a phone interview, said Mr. Yamagami’s father died by suicide when Mr. Yamagami was 4 years old.
A few years later, Mr. Yamagami’s older brother was found to have a malignant lymphoma, the uncle said. This may have made Mr. Yamagami’s mother receptive to the proselytizing of the religious group, known then as the Unification Church and now as the Family Federation for World Peace and Unification, the uncle said. He said she joined the church in 1991.
It was a period when the church was generating headlines for its mass weddings and controversy over how it raised funds from followers. Japan was its biggest center alongside South Korea, and critics accused it of selling expensive items such as vases and seals to followers who couldn’t afford them.
The blogger who wrote the post on which Mr. Yamagami commented, Kazuhiro Yonemoto, was one of those critics and wrote a book in 2000 titled “Children of the Cult.” The church in Japan says some followers improperly used high-pressure sales tactics to raise money, but it says the church itself didn’t do that. The church says it improved monitoring in 2009 to eliminate most of the problems.
In a later letter to the blogger, Mr. Yamagami wrote that his mother’s devotion to the church ruined his family and resulted in her wasting more than 100 million yen—equivalent to more than $700,000. She filed for bankruptcy in 2002. Police confirmed that a copy of the letter, in which Mr. Yamagami identified himself as the blog commenter, was found on a computer in Mr. Yamagami’s apartment.
“It’s no exaggeration to say the experiences then have continued to warp my entire life,” Mr. Yamagami wrote in the letter.
Japan’s former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe was killed by a shooter at a campaign event. Footage shows Mr. Abe – the country’s longest serving leader – giving a speech that was interrupted by two loud bangs. Photo: Yuichi Yamazaki/Getty Images
The church said it was investigating how much the mother gave and hasn’t been able to directly reach her. It said it gave her 50 million yen back over several years starting in 2005.
The Japan church’s chairman, Tomihiro Tanaka, said that if the investigation finds the mother’s donations motivated Mr. Yamagami to engage in violence, “we will take it very seriously.”
The uncle confirmed the total donation amount and said Mr. Yamagami’s mother gave the money on several occasions including when she got cash from selling real estate inherited from her father.
Mr. Yamagami, his brother and their younger sister, born a few months after their father’s suicide, sometimes didn’t have enough to eat, the uncle said. A promising student, Mr. Yamagami saw his hopes of higher education dashed because he didn’t have enough money, the uncle said.
Mr. Yamagami joined Japan’s navy in 2002 and left three years later after he attempted suicide. A military report on the case said Mr. Yamagami told investigators he tried to kill himself because he thought the insurance money from his death could help his brother and sister, according to the uncle, who said he read the report. Japan’s military declined to comment.
“‘Mark my words. Revenge has meaning only when you carry it out yourself.’”
— Tetsuya Yamagami
A decade or so later, Mr. Yamagami’s brother, who had struggled with his health and lost his right eye from his cancer treatment, also died by suicide, the uncle said.
Police said Mr. Yamagami told them he bounced from job to job in the years after he left the navy, working at factories or warehouses.
It couldn’t be determined exactly what prompted him to turn his hatred of the church into action. But Mr. Yamagami later wrote in the letter to the blogger that his December 2020 blog comments marked the start of his quest to get a gun.
On Dec. 15, he wrote that the church took advantage of vulnerable families. The next day, he said the crimes of the church would be exposed for all the world to see.
“At some point, somebody will be killed,” he wrote. “Mark my words. Revenge has meaning only when you carry it out yourself.”
Building an Assassination Plan
Under Japanese law, it is virtually impossible for an average person to buy a gun. Mr. Yamagami would have to make his own.
He was living in a small apartment in Nara, working as a forklift operator at a Kyoto warehouse. In March 2021, he rented a second apartment in the city, according to police. Mr. Yamagami said he used it to dry gunpowder, police said. Six months later, he gave up the second apartment to save money and rented a garage instead for that purpose, he told police.
Mr. Yamagami turned the apartment where he was living into a weapons lab. Police said they seized an electronic scale and blender—presumably to weigh out and mix gunpowder ingredients—as well as other machine tools and gun-like objects. He told police he tested his gun on a Nara mountainside. Police later found wood boards and a drum with bullet marks there.
The gun design Mr. Yamagami ultimately settled on was crude in some respects. He bound two metal pipes together with duct tape and stuffed gunpowder into each pipe behind six bullets. But it was powerful enough to leave bullet holes 100 yards away, police later found.
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In his letter to the blogger, Mr. Yamagami likened his single-minded fervor in making guns to the devotion of church members who committed their lives to the Rev. Moon. “The direction was totally opposite, but it was also something quite similar,” Mr. Yamagami wrote.
Mr. Yamagami wrote that he thought of killing Mr. Moon’s widow, who now leads the church, but worried that might help the church by bringing together the Moons’ feuding sons.
Mr. Yamagami noticed that Shinzo Abe, the longest-serving prime minister in Japanese history, had given speeches after leaving office to groups that were also founded by Mr. Moon and are described by the church as sister organizations.
“Abe is not my original enemy,” Mr. Yamagami wrote in his letter. But he reasoned that Mr. Abe was “the most influential person in the real world and a sympathizer of the Unification Church.” The church has said Mr. Abe wasn’t a follower or adviser and was only one of many world leaders who supported the Moon family’s peace efforts. Mr. Abe’s office didn’t respond to a request seeking comment.
Killing the politician would have ramifications beyond the church, Mr. Yamagami acknowledged, but “I no longer have room to think about the political meaning and consequences of Abe’s death.”
In early July, Mr. Abe was barnstorming the country to support ruling-party candidates in a parliamentary election. Mr. Yamagami learned Mr. Abe would be speaking on July 7 in Okayama, a few hours’ train ride from Nara, according to police who tracked Mr. Yamagami’s online searches.
At 4 a.m. that day, Mr. Yamagami again test-fired his gun, this time at a church building near his apartment, leaving bullet holes in the wall, according to police. Then he took a train to Okayama on a one-way ticket, they said.
Police inspect bullet holes, bottom center, that they believe were left after Tetsuya Yamagami practiced shooting at a building of the Unification Church, now called the Family Federation for World Peace and Unification.
Photo:
Miho Inada/The Wall Street Journal
Mr. Yamagami told police that when he got near the hall where Mr. Abe was speaking, he went to a convenience store and put in a mailbox his letter to Mr. Yonemoto, the blogger.
Mr. Yamagami’s plan went awry when he found the security at the hall was too tight, according to local media. Police declined to comment on that but said Mr. Yamagami left Okayama at 9:30 p.m.
On the train back to Nara, Mr. Yamagami searched for Mr. Abe’s speech schedule on his mobile phone, police said, and discovered a surprise. The former prime minister had made a last-minute change and now was to speak the next morning at one of Nara’s busiest train stations.
Mr. Yamagami had been ready to travel far, but that was no longer necessary. The site of the speech was just one train stop away from his apartment.
He arrived there around 10 a.m. on Friday, July 8. At 11:30 a.m., Mr. Abe climbed onto a small podium, surrounded on all sides by open space. Videos of the event show that after about a minute, Mr. Yamagami moved from Mr. Abe’s side around to his back and, another minute later, approached within several yards, unnoticed by police.
He fired the first shot and missed. Mr. Abe, holding a microphone in his right hand, started to turn back to see what was happening, the videos show.
Mr. Yamagami fired a second shot, hitting Mr. Abe in major arteries. Mr. Abe collapsed off the podium, blood gushing. Mr. Yamagami was immediately tackled to the ground by security and arrested. Mr. Abe was brought by helicopter to a Nara hospital, where he was pronounced dead at 5:03 p.m.
Former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe speaking at an election rally on July 8, minutes before he was shot.
Photo:
The Asahi Shimbun/via REUTERS
Tetsuya Yamagami was immediately tackled by security and arrested after the shooting.
Photo:
Katsuhiko Hirano/Associated Press
The Aftermath
The uncle said that when he heard of the shooting, he urged Mr. Yamagami’s mother and sister to rush to his house by taxi with only the clothes on their back. The uncle said he felt a duty to take care of the family. The two women did so and have been at the uncle’s house since.
On July 25, Mr. Yamagami was transferred to an Osaka detention center, where experts will spend four months on a psychiatric assessment to determine whether he is fit to be charged, authorities said. It couldn’t be determined whether Mr. Yamagami has a lawyer.
The uncle said that although he was giving Mr. Yamagami’s mother shelter, “I don’t even want to see her face.”
The uncle turned down a request to speak directly with the mother, who couldn’t be otherwise reached. He said that since the shooting, she has expressed sympathy for the church and believes she should protect it.
What would she say if she could meet her son?
“I believe she would tell him, ‘You’ve really made a mess for the church.’ That would be it,” the uncle said.
—Chieko Tsuneoka contributed to this article.
Write to Miho Inada at [email protected]
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