Abe's assassination: A rare political killing in post-war Japan

Tribune News Service

New Delhi, July 8

From a time when assassination of top politicians was a norm from the Meiji restoration in 1868 to the mid-1930s, Japan turned into a relatively tranquil society on surface after the Second World War. But attempts on the lives of politicians continued.  But despite Japan's acceptance of its role in the Second World War, there were secretive cults that glorified the Samurai culture. 

The biggest political assassination that rocked Japan was in 1960 when a youth stabbed to death the leader of Japan’s opposition socialist movement, Inejiro Asanuma, at a political rally in Tokyo. Ironically, the 17 year-old assassin belonged to the extreme right-wing Great Japan Patriotic Society which espoused the same values as Nippon Kaigi to which Shinzo Abe belonged.  

The same year Abe’s grandfather and then PM Nobusuke Kishi was stabbed in the thigh and severely injured during a reception at the Prime Minister’s Office. In 1975, PM Takeo Miki, in 1992 Deputy PM Shin Kanemaru, and in 1994 PM Morihiro Hokosawa were attacked but all of them survived the attacks. 

The second major political assassination took place over 40 years after Asanuma was killed. A gangster allegedly hacked to death Koki Ishi, a Parliamentarian from the opposition Democratic Party of Japan in 2002. The assassin allegedly ran away and no motive could be attributed to his attack. Ishi had helped uncover the Aum Supreme Truth Cult’s 1995 sarin gas attacks in the Tokyo underground railway. More recently, Nagasaki Mayor Itcho Ito was campaigning in 2007 when he was shot and killed by a senior member of a crime organisation.

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