Abe Assassination Leads to Japanese Court Dissolving Unification Church
A group of Japanese army officers attempted a coup on 26 February 1936, assassinating two former prime ministers in the process. Their stated goal was to force a civilian government it deemed weak and ineffective to take a harder stance of advancing Japan as Asia’s leader. Though the coup leaders thought they were acting in the interests of Emperor Hirohito, the emperor ordered the army to squash the rebellion. The coup leaders and many of their subordinates who did not die by suicide were arrested and later executed.
The ultimate outcome of the incident, however, resulted in conditions that echoed the coup leader’s ambitions. The military’s influence over Japanese politics increased significantly, leading to Japan’s actions as World War II was igniting around the world. There’s even a memorial near the site of the executions in Tokyo dedicated to the coup leaders.
Jumping forward to modern day Japan, on 25 March, a Japanese court ordered that the Unification Church in Japan be dissolved. The dissolution means the organization’s tax-exempt status would be revoked and its assets would be liquidated.
As bizarre as it sounds, the court order is a tangible result of the 2022 assassination of former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe. Tetsuya Yamagami shot and killed Abe with a homemade gun, and like the 1936 coup attempt, if the court order survives the likely appeals, Yamagami’s actions will likely yield an end result he desired.
Yamagami did not appear to resist when he was apprehended at the scene of Abe’s murder and confessed to the assassination. He said he did so because Abe was “deeply connected with the Unification Church,” and because his primary target, Hak Ja Han, the leader of the sect and widow of the sect’s founder Sun Myung Moon, was unattainable.
The resulting investigation uncovered that the Unification Church—whose followers are often referred to colloquially as “Moonies”—had wreaked havoc in Yamagami’s life, leading to his mother giving the sect the family’s savings—approximately $700,000—after his father died by suicide. His brother also later took his own life. When these facts came to light, the public’s sentiment toward Yamagami shifted, “A year after Abe’s death, his murder has come to seem less the random act of an unhinged loner than a tragedy unfolding slowly over decades,” The Atlantic reported in a September 2023 article.
In circumstances not unlike how segments of the population lionized Luigi Mangione after he allegedly killed UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, Yamagami “is seen by some as a dark hero, a crusader for the country’s underclass,” as The Economist described it, while also saying “Yamagami’s political violence has proved stunningly effective.”
Public sentiment led Japanese media and authorities to investigate Yamagami’s claims of the Unification Church’s political influence. Hundreds of connections between the sect and Japan’s Liberal Democratic Party were unearthed, leading The Atlantic to report, “The rising numbers exposed a scandal hiding in plain sight: A right-wing Korean cult had a near-umbilical connection to the political party that had governed Japan for most of the past 70 years.”
Investigation into the sect itself revealed numerous occasions that matched Yamagami’s experience where the sect had manipulated people into buying expensive knock-off luxury items and donate beyond their means to do so.
Earlier this year, Scott Stewart, vice president of intelligence with Torchstone Global, told Security Management he was “concerned with the way a small segment of the population considers [UnitedHealthcare CEO] Thompson’s murderer to be some sort of celebrity or antihero role model. I fear that this will lead to a contagion effect similar to that caused by the lionization of the Columbine attackers, which has led to scores of attacks across the globe over many years.”
The Thompson assassination was a despicable act, as was the Abe assassination and the assassinations performed during the 1936 coup attempt. There does not appear to be any societal wave of change coming from the Thompson murder because those using it for the vilification of corporate greed have been relegated to the fringe. However, the outcomes in Japan show that society’s attitudes and actions following even something as heinous as murder by assassination can be less black-and-white.
