Tetsuya Yamagami

Tetsuya Yamagami
is a Japanese man who has admitted to assassinating Shinzo Abe, the former Prime Minister of Japan, on 8 July 2022. A resident of Nara, he was arrested at the scene of the assassination. He was 41 years old, had no prior criminal history, and was unemployed at the time of his arrest.
Personal life
Yamagami was born on 10 September 1980 in Mie Prefecture to affluent parents who ran a local construction business. Described as quiet and reserved in high school, he wrote in his graduation yearbook that he "didn't have a clue" what he wanted to do in the future. In an interview with the Asahi Shimbun, a relative stated that Yamagami had been struggling since childhood with the Unification Church that his mother had become a member of. After the death of his maternal grandfather, his mother inherited ownership of the family business.
Yamagami graduated from Nara Prefectural Koriyama Senior High School in 1998, with plans of becoming a firefighter, but was unable to pass a required test due to his near-sightedness. Yamagami did not attend university due to his family's financial problems, and instead attended a vocational school with financial support from his uncle, a since-retired lawyer.
Relatives
Yamagami's father died by suicide by jumping in 1984, when Yamagami was four years old. Yamagami's older brother, who had a longtime struggle with lymphoma which led to him losing eyesight in one eye, was not able to afford medical treatment; he died by suicide in 2015. This greatly impacted Yamagami, according to his uncle.
Yamagami's younger sister and mother refused to be interviewed by the media. They were about 37 and 70 years old respectively at the time of Abe's assassination. For about a month after the assassination, Yamagami's mother lived in Yamagami's paternal uncle's home, before she moved to Osaka alone under the assistance of someone from the Unification Church. Yamagami's maternal uncle, the younger brother of Yamagami's mother, died in a traffic accident; Yamagami's maternal grandmother died in 1982, which shocked Yamagami's mother. She is reportedly still a member of the Unification Church after Abe's assassination and is apologetic for the church over her son's alleged crimes.
Yamagami's paternal uncle, the older brother of Yamagami's father, who provided many accounts about Yamagami's family, was 77 years old when Abe was assassinated. Originally working in the construction contractor industry, he obtained an attorney's licence and started his own legal consulting firm in Osaka. Despite being a lawyer himself, he will not represent Yamagami during the latter's criminal proceedings. After Yamagami's father's death by suicide in 1984, he had been providing financial aid to Yamagami's family for about 20 million yen, up until 2020 when Japan was hit by the COVID-19 pandemic. Yamagami's mother often asked him for money to donate to the Unification Church while neglecting her children, to the point that he once threw a cup of tea on her in a fit of rage. For the whole year since the assassination, Yamagami refused to respond to his mother's requests for visitation in the detention centre, while he was reading and expressing appreciation to letters from his supporters.
Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force
Yamagami joined the Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force (JMSDF) in August 2002; he was posted to Kure Naval Base and assigned to the destroyer .
In February 2005, while in the military, he attempted suicide in hope of his siblings receiving his life insurance payout after learning that his mother neglected his brother to attend Unification Church events in South Korea. In an investigation report written by the JMSDF, Yamagami stated that his "life had been ruined by the Unification Church", and that his "brother and sister are in need", wanting to "help them by giving them my life insurance". He moved to the General Affairs Department at the JMSDF 1st Service School in Etajima. He was discharged from the JMSDF in August 2005 as a quartermaster with the rank of leading seaman.
Career after the navy
After the JMSDF, Yamagami worked for at least 10 different companies for 17 years until the assassination. In December 2006, he worked in a surveying company as a part-timer, and quit in June 2007. He remained unemployed for 2 years and, during that period, he obtained the licences of and . Since then he mostly took short-term part-time jobs or dispatched labour and quit swiftly for personal reasons, usually just after about half a year of employment. The longest job he remained at lasted about one and a half years.
In October 2020, Yamagami started working as a forklift operator in Kyoto Prefecture for a manufacturer that operated in the Kansai region. There, he was described as quiet. He quit in May 2022 after claiming that he was "feeling unwell". After that, Yamagami briefly worked under another temporary staffing firm in Osaka Prefecture until he resigned in early June 2022.
Assassination of Shinzo Abe
On 8 July 2022, Tetsuya Yamagami appeared at the northern exit of Yamato-Saidaiji Station, Nara at 11:30 am, where Shinzo Abe was delivering a campaign speech for a Liberal Democratic Party candidate in the upcoming Upper House election. Abe was positioned inside a traffic island of the crossroad, facing away from the train station. Yamagami was situated behind Abe, with a street separating them. Subsequently, Yamagami began to slowly approach Abe, going unnoticed by Abe's bodyguards. Yamagami then discharged a homemade shotgun, seemingly not hitting anyone in the vicinity. Upon hearing the noise, Abe turned his head to look behind him. Yamagami took few steps forward and fired a second round. Abe immediately displayed signs of severe pain and collapsed to the ground. Abe's bodyguards rushed towards Yamagami and restrained him on the ground.
Criminal proceedings
Yamagami was arrested at the scene of the assassination on suspicion of attempted murder by the Nara Prefectural Police; the charge was upgraded to murder after Abe was pronounced dead. Yamagami was transferred to the Nara Nishi Police Station upon his arrest. He was described as being calm and having made no attempts to flee.
Before any formal charges were brought against Yamagami, he was held at the Osaka Detention House and had been psychiatrically evaluated to determine if he was mentally competent to be indicted. The evaluation was initially set to end on 29 November, but was extended by a request from prosecutors to 6 February 2023. After an appeal by lawyers for Yamagami, the extension was reduced and set to end on 10 January.
On 24 December 2022, the Nara District Prosecutor's Office determined that Yamagami was competent enough to stand trial on the murder charge, based on factors including the capability of making the firearm allegedly used in the assassination.
On 10 January 2023, Yamagami was transferred back to Nara Nishi Police Station to continue his detainment. An additional charge against Yamagami of violating the Firearm and Sword Possession Control Law was added by the Prosecutor's Office. Three days later, Yamagami was formally charged with Abe's murder.
On 30 March 2023, the prosecutor's office added two more criminal charges, namely violations of and property damage, bringing the total charges against Yamagami to four. The charge related to the was dismissed because the prosecutors determined that there was insufficient evidence to support the allegation.
Psychiatric evaluation
While psychiatric assessment of a criminal suspect in Japan usually takes about 3 months, Yamagami's nearly half-year-long assessment is considered unusual. A journalist speculated that the prosecutors were waiting for public sentiment over the assassination to quiet down, due to the aftermath brought by the incident as well as sympathy and admiration towards Yamagami.
Sentencing guidelines
Regarding the possible sentence should Yamagami be convicted of murder, Japanese media cited a similar case in 2007, in which former gang leader Tetsuya Shiroo was convicted of murdering Iccho Itoh during the latter's campaign for re-election as the mayor of Nagasaki City. Shiroo was sentenced to death during the first trial in Nagasaki District Court on the grounds of "strong antisocial behavior which denies the foundation of democracy". This was overturned and reduced to life imprisonment in a second trial in Fukuoka High Court and Supreme Court, as the judges preferred to be cautious of seeking capital punishment for a murder conviction which involved a single victim.
Motive
Yamagami told investigators that his motive had been personal rather than political. After his mother joined the Unification Church around 1991 to 1998, she had given the church about 100 million yen, a parcel of land she had inherited from her father, and the house where she lived with her three children; she subsequently declared bankruptcy in 2002. She had continued donating to the church following the bankruptcy. Yamagami's uncle recalled being contacted by Yamagami and his siblings to complain that they had no food at home, electric bills and house rent were often overdue, prompting the uncle to deliver meals and money for living expenses.
Yamagami blamed the Unification Church for his family's financial problems and held a grudge against the group. Researching the church's connections to Abe in the months before the attack, he believed the former prime minister and his maternal grandfather, former prime minister Nobusuke Kishi, spread the church's influence in Japan.
In a letter sent to journalist on 7 July, the day before the incident, Yamagami introduced himself as "Mada Tari-nai", a regular commenter under that handle on Yonemoto's blog posts, and stressed that he "had spent [much time] trying to obtain guns".
Yonemoto is the editor of a blog reporting on problems experienced by the children of religious cult believers. The letter was sent from Okayama and did not mention the name of the sender, but a "statement of mutual agreement" between Yamagami's family and the Unification Church was enclosed. The agreement arranged the return of 50 million yen by the Unification Church. Tetsuya Yamagami's name and address was handwritten on the agreement.
In the letter, Yamagami wrote that his "connection with the Unification Church dates back about 30 years". He expressed a desire to kill the entire Moon family, but noted that it was unrealistic. He also noted that killing Hak Ja Han, the leader of the Unification Church, or her daughter, would not achieve his goal of getting the Unification Church dissolved. He also wrote that Shinzo Abe was "not my enemy, originally, although I have had negative opinions about him. Abe was just one of the Unification Church's sympathizers who wields the most influence in the real world." Yonemoto found the letter in his home mailbox on 13 July, five days after the assassination. A draft copy of the letter was found on Yamagami's computer.
Yonemoto, who never had met Yamagami before, said: "I think he probably had no one to talk to and wanted to express his feelings to someone. He may have thought I was his friend because I operate the blog he posted on. I understand the suffering of believers' children. But I wish he had consulted with me directly before going that far." Yonemoto initially refused to hand the letter over to police, and it was later seized. Yamagami stated that his Twitter account was @333_hill in his letter to Yonemoto. The account was made in October 2019, with Hak Ja Han scheduled to visit Aichi Prefecture the same month.
Yamagami posted on Twitter that he was "willing to die to liberate every person involved in the Unification Church", and that he had "no concern about what will happen to the Abe administration as a result". Yamagami's Twitter account was suspended from 19 July due to an unspecified violation of Twitter's company policies. A Twitter account belonging to Yamagami was suspended in 2019 for violating Twitter's policies on "abusive language, threatening, or discriminatory language or behavior".
A text mining analysis of Yamagami's tweets indicated that he was very political because of the Unification Church's involvement in Yamagami's family. The most discussed topics among his tweets were "North/South Korea", followed by "gender inequality", "left wingers/liberalism" and "the constitution/reinterpretation of self-defense". However, when it came to his emotional reactions to each topic, his hatred was championed by the "Unification Church", far away from his "family", then "North/South Korea" and "Shinzo Abe".
In May 2023, it was revealed that Yamagami also sent two private messages on Twitter to the anti-cult journalist Eito Suzuki nine days before the assassination. The messages went unnoticed by Suzuki before Yamagami's account was suspended, but the two men were able to re-establish communication using letters delivered by Yamagami's lawyers. Yamagami claimed that the messages were about him being a regular reader of Suzuki's writing, and a question about an important figure from the UC who would attend a 10 July 2022 ceremony held in Urawa-ku, Saitama. Suzuki deduced that that person was the then second-in-command of the UC, Yun Young-ho.
The Japanese media reported that the difficult circumstances endured by Yamagami and his siblings were very similar to the "shūkyō nisei", otherwise known as the "religious second generations", a Japanese term categorising children being raised by parents who are enthusiastic with their religious practices while neglecting or abusing their children. Abe's assassination brought the shūkyō nisei issue under the spotlight in Japan's mainstream media, and more shūkyō nisei victims began to speak out about their hardships and inaction from the government.
Planning
Yamagami said that his initial plan was to assassinate a high-ranking official of the Unification Church, but later decided to target Abe instead. From around the time his mother went bankrupt, Yamagami wandered around the Unification Church building carrying a knife, looking for an opportunity to kill Hak Ja Han. He planned to kill Han with a Molotov cocktail when she visited Aichi Prefecture in 2019, but gave up because he could not enter the church building.
Yamagami told investigators that he initially considered making a bomb and purchased a pressure cooker to create a bomb, but eventually decided to change his plan after realising it could maim or kill innocent bystanders when it exploded. Instead, he made guns that he "could easily fix on a target".
Yamagami allegedly decided to change his target to Abe after learning of his video speech to an event held by the Unification Church's front organisation in September 2021, in which Abe praised Hak Ja Han, the leader of the church. He proceeded to stalk the former prime minister at various locations as he planned his attack over a period of several months. On the day before the assassination, Yamagami travelled by Shinkansen and attended an LDP rally in Okayama Prefecture with the intent of killing Abe there; he was forced to backtrack due to entry protocols. After Abe's schedule was changed to allow him to visit Nara City on 8 July, Yamagami kept track of his movements via Abe's website.
Yamagami's residence was a five-minute walk from Shin-Ōmiya Station; the westbound next stop on the Kintetsu Nara line is Yamato-Saidaiji Station, where the assassination was carried out.
To dry his homemade gunpowder, Yamagami rented an apartment between March and September 2021. He later rented a garage in Nara from November 2021 to February 2022 for the same purpose, costing him 15,000 yen per month. Yamagami was unemployed after resigning in June 2022. At that time, he was 600,000 yen in debt, with 200,000 yen in his savings account. His one-room apartment's rent was 30,000 yen per month. Making homemade weapons was a costly endeavour for Yamagami, who ran out of funds very soon, could not hold down a steady job, and was several hundreds of thousands of yen in debt, which pushed him to proceed with assassinating Abe in July 2022.
Yamagami told police that he had test-fired his homemade gun in a facility linked to the Unification Church on 7 July, the day he went to Okayama to attend Abe's election campaign and assassinate him, later giving up the plan. Six bullet holes were discovered by investigators at the entrance of a building next to the Nara branch of the Unification Church.
Weapon preparations
Yamagami allegedly built the weapon used in the shooting. Police discovered seven homemade firearms similar to that weapon, two of them unfinished, as well as possible explosive devices, during a search of his home following his arrest. They were later seized as evidence by bomb disposal officers after nearby residents were evacuated.
Yamagami stated that he tested his improvised firearms by firing them at multiple wooden boards with an aluminium-covered tray for storing dry gunpowder that he produced from fertiliser, which were later recovered from his vehicle. Plastic-based shotgun shells were also seized by police. Yamagami also claimed that he tested his firearms in the mountains in Nara Prefecture.
Yamagami started buying materials needed to make guns and gunpowder in spring 2021, learning how to make guns and bombs from watching YouTube videos. Websites about bomb-making and weapons manufacturing were discovered in Yamagami's browsing history. He told investigators that he originally intended to carry out the assassination using explosives. However, notes obtained from Yamagami's parents' home by the investigators reveal that he did not want to "cause trouble to the bystanders" and believed that an explosive may not kill Abe, so he instead began making his own gun. The gun used in the shooting was fired by a battery igniting the gunpowder with an electric current.
Idolisation
Since Yamagami's apprehension, he has been sympathised with and hailed as an icon domestically and abroad. T-shirts printed with Yamagami's photograph during Abe's assassination were being sold on Chinese online marketplaces and were worn by some Chinese people in public events. This is believed to be because of Abe's historical negationism by denying the Japanese war crimes committed in China, paying tributes to war criminals commemorated in Yasukuni Shrine, as well as making pro-Taiwan statements.
In Japan, Yamagami's family has been receiving a considerable amount of gift money and presents like food, clothes and books via online gifting websites from his supporters, according to his uncle. When Yamagami's Twitter account noted in his letter for Yonemoto was leaked to the public on 17 July 2022, his Twitter followers surged from zero to over 45,000 within one day. Many of his tweets received a lot of likes and retweets, until his Twitter account was suspended on 19 July. On 10 September 2022, during Yamagami's 42nd birthday, he received a lot of messages of celebration and admiration on social media with the hashtag "Tetsuya Yamagami birthday". Japanese people cosplaying Yamagami's appearance during Abe's assassination were spotted at events like the rally against Abe's state funeral. These cosplayers held cardboard signs displaying the leaders they were against: Abe, Ali Khamenei, Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping. Even before Yamagami was being officially tried, online petition website Change.org had received over 8,700 signatures, as of 8 October 2022, which pleaded for reducing Yamagami's sentence. The sponsors of the petition denied the accusation from opponents that they approved of murder, but sympathised with Yamagami because his suffering as a shūkyō nisei was not an isolated case. They also saw that Yamagami was working hard to rehabilitate himself, so thought that society should give him one more chance instead of sentencing him to death.
The preview version of Revolution+1, a fictional-biographical film based on the reports about Yamagami directed by Masao Adachi was premiered in small theatres across Japan on Abe's state funeral. Some theatres cancelled the screening after receiving public complaints, citing reasons such as "disrespect of the deceased" and "justification of terrorism".
Criminologist warned that "more people began to justify [their radical actions] when dealing with their family and religious issues", and that Yamagami being "treated and followed like a revolutionary leader was alarming". In a December 2022 editorial of The Japan Times which discussed Abe's assassination and its aftermath, editor Kanako Takahara commented that the reason that Yamagami was able to attract so much sympathy from society is because "the investigations show that [Yamagami] had a very traumatized experience" and "the anger or any emotions involved were simply transferred to the issues involving the Unification Church", while admitting that what Yamagami allegedly did was wrong.
Notes
References
1980 births
Living people
Shinzo Abe
People from Mie Prefecture
Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force personnel
Critics of the Unification Church
People charged with murder
Japanese assassins
Assassination of Shinzo Abe