Abe's killing: Assassin’s creed

Yamagami told police he wanted to attack the leader of a religious group that he claimed had defrauded his mother. He believed Abe had promoted this group

“The first shot was fired, and then [Guiteau] took two or three steps nearer to the President and fired a second shot when about four feet from him. On the first shot, the President threw up his hands and fell back. He kept sinking all the time as the second shot was fired.”

This is an account of an eyewitness to the shooting of James Garfield, a former US President, in 1881 by Charles Julius Guiteau, which appears similar to the killing of former Japan PM Shinzo Abe by Tetsuya Yamagami, with the only difference being that the latter scene of crime was in a pacifist state that abjures violence as a matter of public policy.

So informal and relaxed was the mood in the drab traffic island in the western city of Nara, where Abe was making an election campaign speech, with people standing close to him cheering and clapping, some ambling nearby in bicycles, that none noticed that the assassin was standing almost right behind Abe with a handgun, ready to shoot.

Yamagami, the 41-year-old man who shot and killed Abe, told police he wanted to attack the leader of a religious group that he claimed had defrauded his mother and he believed Abe had promoted this group. He apparently denied attacking Abe over his political beliefs. His claim to have formerly been a member of the Japanese navy – should it turn out to be true – would throw interesting insights on previous assassinations and terrorist attacks in both imperial and post-World War II Japan.

Read | Shinzo Abe catalysed new security paradigm

Japanese PM Hamaguchi Osachi died in August 1931 following an attempt on his life the previous November, when he was shot in Tokyo’s railway station by Tomeo Sagoya, a 21-year-old young man, a member of the Aikoku-sha (Patriots’ Association), an extreme nationalist secret society. Osachi’s acceptance of the terms of the 1930 London Naval Treaty limiting armaments was especially resented as it restricted the size of the British, American and German naval forces and downsized the Japanese Imperial Fleet to 70% of its Western rivals.

Though Sagoya was arrested at the scene and in 1933 condemned to death, the sentence was commuted to life imprisonment, and he was released on parole in 1940. The leniency prompted other nationalists, particularly in the armed forces, to resort to violence as a means of influencing politicians. Two well-known coup conspiracies, known as the March Incident and the October Incident, were uncovered in the Imperial Army in 1931 where officers had formed another secret society, the Sakuakai (Cherry Society). One such secret society, called the Ketsumeidan (League of Blood), had killed former finance minister Junnosuke Inoue in March 1932. What was to follow was even more grotesque. On May 15 that year, 11 junior naval officers shot Prime Minister Inukai Tsuyoshi in his official residence.

What the naval officers had planned was to assassinate several other members of the Tsuyoshi administration and his houseguest, the famed comedian Charlie Chaplin, in the hope of provoking a war with the United States, but it failed. Despite the bungle, the assassination marked the growth of militarism in Japan and precipitated a movement that contributed to the advent of war in 1941. As none of those responsible for Tsuyoshi’s murder served long prison sentences, it reinforced the impression that the Imperial Navy exercised very considerable influence and power.

Read | Shinzo Abe catalysed new security paradigm

Even if we consider imperial Japan to be a thing of the past and thus rid of imperial conspiracies, it was as late as in March 1995 that members of a group known as Aum Shinrikyo (established in 1987 by Shoko Asahara) released the chemical nerve agent sarin on several Tokyo subway trains simultaneously, killing 12 people and causing some 6,000 to be hospitalised. The Japanese government revoked its recognition of Aum as a religious organisation. According to a decade-old report of the US Department of State, members of the group continued to adhere to the violent and apocalyptic teachings of its founder, despite claims of renunciation of violence and Asahara’s teachings. Aum Shinrikyo had begun as a spiritual group mixing Hindu and Buddhist beliefs, later working in elements of apocalyptic Christian prophecies. Seven members of the doomsday cult were executed, including Asahara, in 2018.

What could be Abe’s ‘hubris’? It was Shinzo Abe who took the momentous decision to abandon Japan’s post-1945 US-imposed defensive stance to adopt a more robust posture allowing Tokyo to aid allies even when Japan was not threatened, deploy combat-forces overseas, and export military hardware. Abe’s announcement of a reinterpretation of Japan’s US-imposed constitution, enabling its military to play a more active role, had wide repercussions.

Concerned by China’s growing irredentism, the US took Japan on board to forge a ‘ring of steel’ around China by dint of which Japan boosted security ties with India and Australia, exercised naval-air training with, and material-transfers to, Hanoi and Manila, mounted joint naval drills in the South China Sea, and deployed anti-ship missiles overlooking the Pacific. Abe’s policy toward international peace and security, proposed in 2013 under the basic principle of ‘proactive contribution to peace’, transformed Japan’s security policy and enabled it to exercise the right of ‘collective self-defence’ (which used to be ‘unconstitutional’). His brand of ‘proactive pacifism’ was almost certain to raise hackles.

In America, four presidents have lost their lives to assassin’s bullets. Fifteen presidents, besides these, have fallen victim to assassination attempts, and two others have conspiracy theories surrounding their deaths. The killing of President John Kennedy changed the course of the Cold War.

It was Kennedy who warned of the Soviets’ growing arsenal of ICBMs and vowed to reinvigorate US nuclear forces. We might argue that Japan is certainly not the US that was birthed in genocide against Native Americans and in the enslavement of black Africans, where violence is entrenched and where assassinations have been used as a tool against government figures, and by the government itself. But grudge and resentment are like poison trees fed fat by their own animus, be it in Japan, America or India – no stranger to prime ministerial assassinations.

Political assassinations are located within their particular cultural matrix to describe how a specific form of killing has first been conceptualised, then nurtured, and finally executed, as part of an alternative system of ‘justice’. As policies of the heads of states – irrespective of whether they are in the saddle or not -- change lives for the better or worse, they are particularly vulnerable, certain to have many enemies who might be too eager to strike, should opportunity present itself. Security policies should be made with this thought in mind. Else, the assassination of Abe will not be the last.