Shinzo Abe, Japan’s former prime minister, dies after being shot
The former Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe has died after being shot while making a campaign speech, plunging the country into grief as it comes to terms with the loss of its longest-serving leader.
The 67-year-old, who resigned in 2020, was flown to hospital by helicopter after the attack in the western city of Nara, and pronounced dead about five and a half hours later.
The first assassination of a sitting or former Japanese premier since the days of prewar militarism in the 1930s sent shockwaves through Japan, where political violence is rare and guns are tightly controlled.
“This attack is an act of brutality that happened during the elections – the very foundation of our democracy – and is absolutely unforgivable,” said the current prime minister, Fumio Kishida, Abe’s protege, struggling to keep his emotions in check.
Footage broadcast by Japanese media showed Abe’s speech interrupted by two loud bangs and smoke, with Abe stumbling to the ground after the second shot.
The hospital that tried to save him said he died at 5.03pm (8.03am GMT). He bled to death from deep wounds to the heart and the right side of his neck, despite receiving more than 100 units of blood in transfusions over four hours, Hidetada Fukushima, the professor in charge of emergency medicine at Nara Medical University hospital, told a televised news conference.
Police said a 41-year-old unemployed man, Tetsuya Yamagami, was apprehended at the site and had admitted to shooting the former prime minister with a homemade weapon. The public broadcaster NHK quoted Yamagami as telling police he was dissatisfied with Abe and wanted to kill him.
Police said at a press conference Yamagami had said he had a grudge against what was described as a specific organisation he believed Abe to be a part of, but officers could not say whether the organisation actually existed.
Yamagami told police he had made multiple handmade explosives and guns in the past, NHK reported. Police discovered several possible explosive devices during a search of his home, according to local media. NHK reported that bomb disposal technicians were preparing to carry out a controlled explosion on the premises.
A photograph showed two cylindrical metal parts that appeared to have been heavily bound with black tape lying on the road near the scene. Police said they were investigating if the bullets used in the attack were also homemade.
Abe, who had been in Nara to make a campaign speech ahead of this Sunday’s upper house elections, was a conservative politician known for his “Abenomics” policy to lift the world’s third-biggest economy out of deflation and for supporting a more prominent role for Japan’s military to counter growing threats from North Korea and a more assertive China.
Having quit abruptly as premier in 2007 after one year in the post, Abe swept back for a rare second stint in 2012, pledging to revive a stagnant economy, loosen the limits of a post-second world war pacifist constitution and restore conservative values.
He was instrumental in winning the 2020 Olympics for Tokyo, cherishing a wish to preside over the Games and even appeared as the Nintendo video game character Mario during the Olympic handover at Rio 2016.
While in office, Abe failed to realise his main political ambition – to revise Japan’s “pacifist” constitution, which prohibits the country from using force to resolve international disputes. In recent weeks, he had voiced support for significant rises in Japan’s defence budget, citing Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as proof that Japan should stay vigilant in case of a Chinese invasion of Taiwan.
Abe became Japan’s longest-serving premier in November 2019, but by the summer of 2020 public support had been eroded by his handling of the Covid-19 outbreak as well as a series of scandals, including the arrest of his former justice minister. Citing the return of a chronic bowel complaint that had contributed to the premature end to his first term in office, Abe resigned without presiding over the Games, which was postponed to 2021 due to the pandemic.
Japan has close to “zero-tolerance” of gun ownership – an approach that experts say contributes to its extremely low rate of gun crime. There were six reported gun deaths in 2014, according to the National Police Agency, and the number rarely exceeds 10, in a country of 126 million people.
Airo Hino, a political science professor at Waseda University, told Reuters such a shooting was unprecedented in Japan. “There has never been anything like this,” he said.
Senior Japanese politicians are accompanied by armed security agents but often get close to the public, especially during political campaigns when they make roadside speeches and shake hands with passersby.
In 2007, the mayor of Nagasaki was shot and killed by a yakuza gangster. The head of the Japan Socialist party was assassinated during a speech in 1960 by a rightwing youth with a samurai short sword. A few other prominent postwar politicians were attacked but not injured.