![]() “The inspiration that they have caused for the entire planet is unbelievable,” Abe said of the Moon family. Last September, Abe made an appearance, along with Donald Trump, at the Unification Church’s digital Rally of Hope, convened under the auspices of Moon’s widow, Hak Ja Han Moon. Abe’s personal connections to the Unification Church surfaced in 2006, when the press reported that he had sent a congratulatory message to the participants at a church-affiliated event being held in Fukuoka. These included those of Abe’s father, Shintaro, who was first elected to the Diet in 1958 and who was a leading candidate to become Prime Minister in the nineteen-eighties, before a scandal derailed his ambitions. The former Prime Minister Nobusuke Kishi-Abe’s grandfather-and his allies spoke highly of Moon and his adherents, and Abe’s party, the Liberal Democratic Party, often counted on volunteer labor and a bloc of votes from Moon’s followers in support of its campaigns. Moon’s ties to the Abe family extend back three generations. During the Cold War, he used church influence to forge inroads with world leaders, including Japanese ones. Moon created the Federation for Victory Over Communism, a political wing of the Unification Church, in 1968. The connections between Abe’s family and Sun Myung Moon, the Korean religious leader who founded the Unification Church, are little discussed in mainstream Japanese media but well documented. After a series of attempts to attack church members and facilities, the alleged assassin had switched his focus to Abe. His mother had donated more than a hundred million yen over the years, since joining the church, in 1998, plunging the family into dire poverty. Yamagami blamed the Family Federation for World Peace and Unification, otherwise known as the Unification Church, for destroying his family. Instead, it seemed, he had been motivated by a grudge against a religious group that he considered Abe to be associated with. Prime Minister Fumio Kishida declared, “We must defend free and just elections, which are the basis of democracy,” and said that Japan would “never yield to violence.” The sentiment was echoed and amplified by other political parties, who explicitly framed the shooting as an act of “terrorism.” This narrative began to crumble when the police released a statement that the gunman, Tetsuya Yamagami, a forty-one-year-old Nara resident, professed no issues with Abe’s politics. The brazen daylight shooting, days before a major national election, initially seemed, to many, like a case of political violence. And, as the single longest-serving prime minister in Japan’s history, he remained, in many ways, the country’s face to the world. His hawkish brand of conservatism divided Japan and infuriated many leaders in the region, but endeared him to others, most famously Donald Trump. Even after stepping down as Prime Minister, in the summer of 2020, owing to health issues, Abe was that rarest of presences on the Japanese political scene: an internationally recognizable face, even a celebrity. ![]() The killing of the former Prime Minister of Japan, Shinzo Abe, on July 8th, sent shock waves rippling across Japan and the globe.
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