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Pacifist Japan confronts a political assassin
The trial of Shinzo Abe’s killer is testing the country’s moral limits.
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Tetsuya Yamagami, the man accused of murdering former Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe in 2022, is garnering public sympathy as his trial gets under way three years on.
PHOTO: AFP
Leo Lewis
The cold killers of fiction have an endlessly sinister appeal. Rueful assassins, rogue assassins, the wisecracking, the laconic, the licensed-to-kill. The variety of screen, game and literary killers attests to a fascination that would feel absolutely wrong if it were not laced with a seductive permission to indulge.
When it comes to real-world assassinations, though, we like to think we respond more appropriately, whatever our sympathies with the killer’s motivation or with the dark pragmatism of state-sanctioned violence. We are horrified when assassination is deployed with no possible legitimacy but often grimly accepting of its necessity, in the case of Osama bin Laden, say.
