Assassination of Shinzō Abe Quotes

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“If you think about it carefully, what the assassin of Abe, Tetsuya Yamagami, did is strange. If the president of the Unification Church had been shot, I could understand it, even if I would in no way condone it. But Mr. Abe was shot and they criticized the Unification Church so much. My current impression is that the way the media reported it was quite strange.”

“When such a prominent public figure is assassinated, one might expect the media to focus on the act of murder. But in Japan, the narrative took a sharp detour. Fueled by long-standing opponents of the Unification Church, the press began to frame the story as a cautionary tale about the plight of the “shukyo nisei”—second-generation members of religious movements. Yamagami, in this version, became the poster child for religious trauma. The assassin was not a criminal, but a victim. …The teaser [for a series on the assassination by Mainichi Shimbun] described the murder as having “social significance”—a phrase that ignited a firestorm online. Critics [had] rightly asked: since when does gunning down a former Prime Minister qualify as socially meaningful? Is this journalism or a eulogy for terrorism? …To its credit, the prosecution is trying to keep the focus on the crime. They want to exclude testimonies about the Unification Church and concentrate on the fact that Yamagami killed a public figure in broad daylight. But the defense, backed by anti-cult activists and sympathetic scholars, is pushing hard to make the church the villain.”