DRAW ATTENTION
Yamagami “thought if he killed someone as influential as former prime minister Abe, he could draw public attention to the Church and fuel public criticism of it”, a prosecutor told a district court in western Japan’s Nara region in October.
The Unification Church was established in South Korea in 1954, with its members nicknamed “Moonies” after founder Sun Myung Moon.
In a plea for leniency, his defence team stressed his upbringing had been mired in “religious abuse” stemming from his mother’s extreme faith in the Unification Church.
In despair after the suicide of her husband – and with her other son gravely ill – Yamagami’s mother poured all her assets into the Church to “salvage” her family, Yamagami’s lawyer said, adding that her donations eventually snowballed to around ¥100 million (US$1 million at the time).
Yamagami was forced to give up pursuing higher education. In 2005, he attempted to take his own life before his brother died by suicide.
The defence team’s Kohei Matsumoto called it “regrettable” that the court dismissed their claim that tragic events in Yamagami’s adulthood “form a continuous sequence” from his upbringing and “are directly connected to his motive for the crime”.
Investigations after Abe’s murder led to cascading revelations about close ties between the Church and many conservative lawmakers in the ruling Liberal Democratic Party, prompting four ministers to resign.
In 2020, Yamagami began hand-crafting a firearm, a process that involved meticulous test-firing sessions in a remote mountainous area.
This points to the highly “premeditated” nature of his attack on Abe, prosecutors said.
The assassination was also a wake-up call for a nation which has some of the world’s strictest gun controls.
Gun violence is so rare in Japan that security officials at the scene failed to immediately identify the sound made by the first shot, and came to Abe’s rescue too late, a police report after the attack said.
The Japanese version of life imprisonment leaves open the possibility of parole, although in reality, experts say many die while incarcerated.
Source: CNA
