On Friday morning, the former Prime Minister of Japan, Shinzo Abewas speaking on a street in Nara – the former imperial capital among whose thousand-year-old pagodas serfs walk asking for caresses -, when two shots fired from a homemade pistol that pierced his chest and neck, an event comparable in its local magnitude to the assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy in the US.
The dimension of crime for a society where in 2018 there were nine deaths from firearms -against 39,740 in the US- is more traumatic due to its extremely exceptional nature. Y It is symptomatic that in order to kill Abe, Yamagami Tetsuya -former soldier- had to make his own pistol.
Social discontent
According to Marian Moya, anthropologist and director of the Center for Japanese Studies at the National University of San Martín, “Japanese is not a non-violent society, but one that effectively represses -and self-represses- violence-; and when it arises, it takes on the dimension of the eruption of a volcano. In general nothing ever happens; there it is privileged to maintain harmony by avoiding conflict (given its Confucian roots). And they are so against violence – the ghost of World War II – that the impact of an already impressive fact is greater than in countries where violence is daily. From the Japanese point of view, some will classify it as a terrorist act – it is understandable that it is seen that way – when for us it would be a political act. Attributing it to madness is, in a way, depoliticizing it and taking all burdens off society., to deposit it only in the individual. But we have to take it with a grain of salt; The motivation is not yet clear.
This Friday’s editorial in The Japan Times begins thus: “The original editorial comment that was written to fill this space was a heart cry -a heartfelt cry- to the US, a request for sensitivity to stop the devastating violence of handguns that has become daily there. But with extraordinary sadness and anger, we have been forced to replace that comment by mourning the murder of Shinzo Abe.”
For Matias Chiappe -Professor at the Center for Asian and African Studies (CEAA) of El Colegio de México- “I would avoid seeing it as the case of a madman; I understand that this person is taking a political position – extreme and criminal, it would not be necessary to clarify it – in the context of a critical situation for a society with discontent, anger and fury against politicians; for Argentines it is common, but the yen has devalued 20 percent, something unthinkable for Japan. For 20 years they have been experiencing the collapse of a system that in the ’70s and ’80s was including more and more people with a job for life in a company, and that in the ’90s exploded with the financial bubble. With the pandemic, many SMEs were merged. This is the context of this criminal overflow, in a society where it is very difficult to transmit a counter-hegemonic discourse in the media; the fact that the crime was committed two days before the elections makes it clear that this extreme gesture was intended to leave a message of dissatisfaction with politics”.
According to Mario Bogarin –Japanologist from the Autonomous University of Baja California, Mexico- “I suspect that whoever killed him has nothing to do with politics; though we don’t know yet. In Japan they will have a political culture as mafia as you want, but they don’t solve their problems with bullets. Regardless, I don’t think Abe was a fascist or a militarist who wanted to go back to Imperial Japan; what he did propose was to modify the National Constitution to rearm the country, citing Chinese, Russian and North Korean threats. He pointed to what would be a “recovery of the national essence.” The Japanese political spectrum is noticeably different from that of the West; When we talk about left and right, we don’t always talk about liberals versus classic conservatives; there, politics has more to do with an issue of identity. And I can’t imagine anything less Japanese – in a society that is so politically, socially and psychologically self-regulated – than breaking into a public act with bullets. The assassination of a Prime Minister -Abe was already ex- had not occurred since 1932 in a context marked by militarism. Was it an act of rebellion or simply that of a madman seeking fame as with Ronald Reagan? If it was the former, I guess they’ll never say. And if it was the second, we’ll know right away”.
Of conservative stock
Shinzo Abe was a determining politician for Japan in the last 20 years (Prime Minister from 2006 to 2007 and from 2012 to 2020 when he resigned). He came to power with the Liberal Democratic Party (PLD) as the youngest Prime Minister since 1945, but with an ultraconservative family lineage that marked his life as a “hawk”: his father was Minister of Foreign Affairs in the postwar period and his grandfather Nobusuke Kishi He was a minister in the war cabinet Admiral Tojoparticipating in the decision to bomb Pearl Harbor. In fact, he was imprisoned for war crimes but not convicted by the Tokyo Military Court, through the political agreement with the US to have a strike force against communist China (he was later Prime Minister twice and strengthened ties with the Americans ). According to Marian Moya, for the most nationalist sector of society – which by the way promotes close ties with the US – the country that defeated them in World War II is equivalent to the sensei –venerable master– who deserves respect, as they are the only ones in history who defeated them.
access to guns
In Japan only shotguns are sold -difficult to disguise- and pistols are prohibited. To apply for a license, the buyer must attend a course and pass a written and a shooting exam with a 95 percent success rate on both. Then a rigorous study of the person’s history is made – criminal record, his psychology, debts, relationships with crime, family and even friends – and if authorized, he must inform the police where he keeps the weapon and the bullets. -on separate shelves-, while it is visited once a year to check everything. Every three years the entire process must be repeated. The person can have only one weapon and if a second -or an illegal- one is found, they would be sentenced to 15 years in prison. Anyone who fires a gun in a public space could face life in prison (Abe’s killer may be sentenced to death). Result: in Japan there are 0.25 weapons for every 100 people (in the US there are 120) and they have – for different reasons – one of the lowest crime rates in the world. The last time a politician was shot to death was in 2007: the mayor of Nagasaki, Iccho Ito.
According to the philosopher Byung Chul Han, in “performance societies” violence “mutates from visible to invisible (…) from real to virtual, from physical to psychic (…) and retreats to subcutaneous, subcommunicative, capillary and neuronal spaces, in such a way that it can give the impression that it has disappeared”, but it remains constantly transferred to the interior of people, who do not make an immediate discharge of their destructive energies: they elaborate them psychically. And when someone is overcome by this hell of the same, they implode or explode overwhelmed.
The assassination of Shinzo Abe will mark Japanese politics for a long time, a trauma with consequences as unpredictable as the event itself, by a man who had never carried out a political act and perhaps has spent his entire life directing his frustrations inward – the way of functioning of a Confucian society – until one day he couldn’t take it anymore: He learned that Abe would speak around his house, he walked a few steps behind the victim’s back and expressed his hatred in the worst way.