SHINZO Abe, who holds the record of being Japan’s youngest and longest-serving Prime Minister, was assassinated during a public speech in Kashihara City, Nara Prefecture, last July 8, 2022, by what Japanese media and authorities claimed to be a former member of Japan’s Self Defense Maritime Force.
A video of the incident that went viral showed Abe, 67, delivering his speech at a busy street when the suspect, dressed in grey shirt and brown trouser, crept up from behind him and shot him twice, before he slumped down while his security aide wrestled with the man later on identified as ‘Tetsuma Yamagami,’ 41.
Yamagami, according to mainstream media and Internet reports, decided to assassinate Abe for his involvement with the ultra-conservative ‘Unification Church.’ Yamagami claimed his mother was bankrupted thru her constant donation to the church founded by the Rev. Sun Myung Moon and originally based in South Korea.
While world leaders including President Ferdinand Romualdez Marcos Jr. and his predecessor, President Rodrigo Duterte expressed shock over the incident and sent their condolences to the Japanese, Abe, was a controversial figure in the eyes of many Asians who were victims of Japanese Imperialism during World War 2.
While world leaders including President Ferdinand Romualdez Marcos Jr. and his predecessor, President Rodrigo Duterte expressed shock over the incident and sent their condolences to the Japanese, Abe, was a controversial figure in the eyes of many Asians who were victims of Japanese Imperialism during World War 2.
As a conservative himself and even branded as ‘right-wing nationalist’ by some sections in the Japanese media, Abe has adopted a ‘negationist’ stand on Japanese war crimes by denying or downplaying these atrocities, among them, the systematic exploitation of ‘comfort women’ in Korea, the Philippines and other occupied countries. Japan also use of humans, in its biological warfare program during the Second World War that victimized mostly Chinese citizens in the Japanese occupied region of Manchuria.
As the war ended and with Japan defeated, it was the US Imperialism that was the beneficiary of these barbaric Japanese experiments.
Abe has earned the ire of both China and Korea by regularly paying homage to Imperial Japan’s war dead at the Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo, which for them is a symbol of Japanese Imperialism and aggression.
At age 54, Abe first became prime minister in 2006 and president of the dominant Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), the youngest at that time, but resigned for health reasons the next year.
The LDP is a creation of the Central Intelligence Agency and General Douglas Macarthur, to ensure that only conservatives, even those tainted with war crimes, would dominate Japan’s politics and closely allied with US Imperialism, a strategic decision that remains true to this day.
Abe returned to office in 2012 but resigned in 2020, also for health reason, amidst the COVID-19 pandemic and with Japan back into an economic recession. His second 8-year term was the longest in Japan’s post-war history.
Aside from ‘historical negationism,’ Abe was also instrumental in revising Japan’s pacifist Constitution to enable its military again to be deployed abroad, coupled with Japan’s return to militarization in hopes of reviving its imperialist ambition, this time as a surrogate in Asia and the Pacific of US Imperialism.
Abe was also solidly behind the ‘anti-China’ campaign being pushed by US Imperialism and was the leading proponent of the ‘QUAD,’ which, for all intent and purpose, is a military alliance involving Japan, India, the United States and Australia.
The aim of QUAD is the containment of China.