The Crime That Killed Shinzo Abe | Hacker News Reader

The Crime That Killed Shinzo Abe

shingetsunewsagency.com

495 pointshunglee2454 comments

The linked article ends with this:

“Why the Japanese media has refused to identify the ‘religious group’ that formed the motive for the killing must remain as speculation at this juncture, though it reflects very poorly on Japan’s status as a democratic nation.”

It’s important to note that the Japanese media is not monolithic.

It’s true that the major newspapers (Asahi, Yomiuri, Mainichi, Nikkei, etc.) and the broadcaster NHK do not, as of this moment, seem to have named the religious group yet; nor do they seem to have explained why they are not naming it.

However, the group is named in online news stories by some of the weekly magazines [1, 2, 3] and will presumably be in their print editions within a few days. It’s all over Twitter etc., too.

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20220710064519/https://www.daily...

[2] https://web.archive.org/web/20220710061754/https://gendai.is...

[3] https://web.archive.org/web/20220710062542/https://news.yaho...

It was explained to me when I lived in Japan, that while there are many Japanese media companies that exist independently in Japan, they all have to go to one central government body to renew their licenses to exist. They get some leeway but it's it's not much

It's not about "licenses to exist", but access to the press clubs (kisha clubs). Basically, if the government doesn't like what you print/say, you get frozen out the clubs and hence out of all government news.

https://freespeechdebate.com/discuss/an-impregnable-fortress...

I like the model of ths German Bundespressekonferenz where an organization made up of journalists invites the German goverment for press conferences instead of the other way around.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bundespressekonferenz#Organisa...

Surely that can only work at the will of the government - if I'm the German chancellor and decide I don't like it, I can just tweet that I'll be making a statement outside my front door; the first time all the blogger hacks will show up and get a great scoop; the second time everyone will?

Can the journalist organization exclude its members if they break ranks, so to speak?

> It's not about "licenses to exist", but access to the press clubs (kisha clubs)

Its the same in the UK.

UK "political editors" working for the larger media outlets are granted lobby passes, which they guard like some precious gem stone.

Lobby passes grant the journalists free access to certain parts of the Parliament buildings, in particular the lobby (hence the name of the pass !). It also grants them access to the Downing Street media briefings, which due to some obscure tradition, are always held behind closed doors.

That's why many UK "political editors" ask such dumb limp questions of UK leaders. Its because they run scared of having their sacred lobby pass taken away from them.

I lived in London a couple of years in the early 2000s and me and my roommates used to watch Jeremy Paxman interview politicians and we were more or less in chock that he actually pushed them when they tried their usual non-answers.

Now, we were quite young and didn’t really know that much about British politics to get that much out of it but it was so refreshing to see a interviewer that didn’t just back down like they do back in my home country.

> That's why many UK "political editors" ask such dumb limp questions of UK leaders

To be fair, politicians still feel the need to get on TV and face Paxman and Andrew Netflix and so on, who are happy to take them to pieces whatever their personal political leanings. That plus PMQs and constituency duties, and I think UK politicians get grilled sufficiently…

Which is why "Prime Minister's Questions" time is so valuable and entertaining.

Kinda like how the threat of revoking the press's access to the White House keeps them toeing the establishment line

https://www.cjr.org/the_media_today/white-house-press-passes...

That worked well. /s

This is the same in every country, including the US where entire agencies will just stop talking to you if you piss them off (especially police departments.) It's one of the ways we get all this propaganda even though we have a nominally "free" press.

"This is the same in every country, including the US where entire agencies will just stop talking to you if you piss them off"

They only stop talking to you through official channels. There will always be leakers, disgruntled employees and others willing to talk to you anonymously or unofficially. Not to mention that you can talk to people and ask questions without announcing that you're a reporter. This used to be called investigative journalism.

Even they often try to cross the line, all German public agencies including police are required (by law in the states, by constitution for the federal level) to answer journalists' questions.

It's not "the same" at all. It's a matter of degrees, which make a huge difference.

Yes and no.

Trump actually had a reporter's white house press credentials revoked and a court reversed it.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-trump-reporter/u-s-ap...

The court does recognize the government has a right to prevent unruly behavior. But once it creates a forum with rules on who attends; it simply can not target those who disagree with it's speech.

Yes, American agencies have stonewalled in the past but the 1st and 14th amendments do place restrictions and practices the governments must follow or their acts can be blocked and that American courts do uphold. As far as I know most countries do not have these practices.

"if the government doesn't like what you print/say, you get frozen out the clubs and hence out of all government news"

What happened to independent investigative reporting?

They don’t get invited and do their own investigation and reporting instead of paraphrasing government announcements.

I think it’s the same pattern in many countries, where there will be two different rythme: almost immediate news with official communication coming in near real-time, and a second wave of news from journalists who took more time to form an opinion/check what they want to publish. Both waves happen in big newspapers, independent ones only bet on the second wave.

are we pretending that access to govt info and its subsequent quid-pro-quo is not a MSM dynamic basically everywhere?

Canada wants to implement this under the Trudeau liberal government. It's been a little disturbing to watch a Canadian liberal government take steps in the direction of totalitarian control since the beginning of the pandemic. When was the last time the political right has positioned themselves in opposition to the left in defense of free speech and individual rights and freedoms? Strange times.

It's not just Canada. "Free Speech" is no longer a part of modern left-of-center policy in general. Even the American ACLU no longer defines itself as a defender of free speech the way it used to. The argument (for what it's worth) is that the far-right is defending hate speech through the concept of free speech and so free speech is no longer worth defending as an ideal.

Would you mind linking to a source about the ACLUs changing relationship to free speech? I just looked at their website and it seems like they are still centering free speech as one of their major issues and a list of actions they have taken in recent years includes support of e.g. the NRA and an anti-muslim group.

  > modern left-of-center policy in general

serious question: were "liberals" really very much "left" in the first place? maybe culturally left i suppose, but economically and politically?

The right campaigned on cancelling Kaepernick and right-wing religious universities are notoriously against free expression.

all these news organizations in Japan are nothing but government mouthpieces. When Abe was in power the journalists could not stop singing his praises and how smart the whole "Abenomics" was supposed to be.

There is no licensing of the print or online media in Japan. However, there are a number of factors that effectively limit the freedom of many media outlets.

The kisha clubs [1], which control media access to government officials and the police, are restricted to reporters from major media organizations. The tabloid press frequently complains about those restrictions and use those restrictions as justification for their less savory reporting methods.

The libel and privacy laws are fairly strict [2, 3] and have been tightened in recent years, making publications more hesitant to report negative or personal information about individuals, including politicians. Some religious groups have used those laws to suppress negative reporting; as soon as I noticed on Friday afternoon that the mainstream media weren’t giving the name of the religious group, I wondered if fear of lawsuits was the reason. (I still don’t know.)

Extremist groups have targeted Japanese media, and have sometimes attacked [4] or killed [5] journalists, for reports that the groups didn’t like about the Imperial family or historical matters. This can make journalists hesitant to raise controversial topics.

The major newspapers are published by large conglomerates that have diverse business interests. The weekly magazines have, over the years, reported many examples of stories that were suppressed by their larger competitors because of conflicts of interest. An amusing one that I remember is when a magazine was not allowed to include the term shōgi daoshi—literally, “falling over like shogi pieces”—in their regular advertisement in a daily newspaper; they wanted to use it to describe an accident where people were crushed in and killed in a crowd, but that newspaper ran a major shogi tournament and wouldn’t allow the term shōgi to be used in a negative context. Some weekly magazines that frequently publish reports of salacious scandals about celebrities and politicians refrain from publishing similar reports about well-known writers, because their parent companies depend on work by those writers for other publications.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kisha_club

[2] https://kellywarnerlaw.com/japan-defamation-laws

[3] https://www.omm.com/resources/alerts-and-publications/alerts...

[4] https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/噂の眞相

[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tomohiro_Kojiri

> An amusing one that I remember is when a magazine was not allowed to include the term shōgi daoshi—literally, “falling over like shogi pieces”

An amusing one on multiple levels. Standard shogi pieces don't fall over! They're not miniature statues like in Western chess, but flat reversible tiles [0]. It's like it was written by a Western journalist who needed to translate his idiom into Japanese.

[0] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/5/5c/Sh...

I don’t have any shogi pieces handy—I’m more of a lapsed go player myself—but can’t they be stood on their ends like dominos? Image searches for shōgi daoshi in Japanese yield a lot of pictures like this:

https://www.photo-ac.com/main/search?q=将棋倒し&srt=dlrank&qt=&p...

Western chess pieces don't fall over like dominoes either, since they're usually kind of rounded...

In the US all radio and TV stations also have to get and renew licenses from the government to be allowed to broadcast.

And online people have to effectively renew a license from Google to broadcast

If you are interested in the media in Japan and how it chooses to report or not report news I recommend the book "Exposure: Inside the Olympus Scandal". It tells the story of loss hiding at Olympus. Especially interesting are the chapters about how difficult it was to get any news coverage of some extremely suspicious things.

That and for a more general take on why Japan isn't the heaven-on-earth that weeaboos hold it up to be, I recommend "Japan - a reinterpretation" by Patrick Smith. It has a lot about freedom of the press and the Japanese media landscape, especially the infamous "Kisha Clubs" (self-censoring).

Maybe they don't want copycats.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5296697/

It's not really any different than the US.

Lots of information tends to be "widely known" online to those who care to dig, but the mainstream outlets stick to some narrative that is best described as "half truth".

It's interesting that even in US papers, the sudden trend of Russian oligarchs to become suicidal or murder-suicidal overnight is largely reported at face value, at best giving the context about how suddenly and frequently it is occurring.

Most mainstream press won't report things they can't prove. When they report on a Russian journalist falling out a window, they will usually mention that lots of opposition journalists have fallen out of windows and let readers draw conclusions, but we still have absolutely no direct proof they're being assassinated. I think news consumers have started to change their expectations and just really, really want pat answers fed to them rather than reading about what we actually know.

There's lots of information out there that's widely known that is true. There's also lots of widely known information that is untrue.

I find a lot of that information is in the mainstream media… just that you have to pay attention.

Case in point, the death of Epstein.

I'm genuinely curious. What hidden but verifiable facts have been hidden from the public with respect to the Epstein death?

Not much was hidden, the issue is the pantomime that it was completely reasonable to expect that a suicide of such a figure when the cameras were off and the guards weren't aware the cameras were off is a complete coincidence, and playing coy with his connections to the elite. Those facts weren't hidden but they weren't mentioned far less than they should and eventually not at all. Beyond that the media failed in their duty to confront the authorities.

In the case of Epstein, journalists weren't allowed by their editors to do their jobs.

The death of Epstein was reported based on the observable facts. Realistically, he probably killed himself and he probably never had any incriminating evidence on anyone to warrant a hit. The conspiracy theories are all 99% speculation. The fact that notable people travelled with him isn't proof of anything. We have some actual evidence against Prince Andrew and it's all gotten in the press. We have no proof on anyone or anything else beyond what was charged in court against him and Maxwell. Reporting anything else would be unethical and unprofessional.

Yes indeed. And if you really want to go down a rabbit hole, test it out on the subjects that find the likes of CNN & FOX agreeing in lockstep. More often than not it's to hide the truth than to report it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D9rbHpA_6W4

I ran it through Google Translate because I was curious. It appears to be something called the Unification Church?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unification_Church

> The Family Federation for World Peace and Unification, widely known as the Unification Church or Unificationism, is a new religious movement whose members are called Unificationists and sometimes colloquially Moonies.[2] It was officially founded on 1 May 1954 under the name Holy Spirit Association for the Unification of World Christianity (HSA-UWC) in Seoul, South Korea by Sun Myung Moon (1920–2012), a Korean Messiah claimant also known for his business ventures and engagement in social and political causes.[3][4][5][6]

> The beliefs of the Unification Church are based on Moon's book Divine Principle, which differs from the teachings of Nicene Christianity in its view of Jesus[7] and in its introduction of the concept of "indemnity".[8] The movement is well known for its unique "Blessing" or mass wedding ceremonies.[9]

> The Unification Church has been controversial, with some early critics calling it a dangerous cult.[10][11] It also has been controversial for its involvement in politics, which include anti-communism and support for Korean reunification.

Moonies used to be a big deal at college campuses in California. When my husband and I went to Berkeley in the 1970s, the Moonies were everywhere. They did many questionable things before fading away.

My husband is 4 years older than me - so he was not as aware of their recruitment practices. He said he was invited to dinner by a very attractive young woman who kept flirting with him all through dinner. She then invited him to a weekend retreat. He said he became suspicious and did not go. It was a good thing he did not go. By the time I went to Berkeley - we all knew about the retreats.

  >  She then invited him to a weekend retreat. He said he became suspicious and did not go

great article about that (infiltrating the moonies in san diego)

https://www.sandiegoreader.com/news/1980/may/08/cover-revere...

Moonies were prevalent in Chile later on, during the late 90s. The press would refer to them as “la secta Moon” (the Moon cult).

What happened at the retreats? Quick search gave no answers...

Pressure to join and indoctrination

Yep I remember the "Moonie" cult in the news from the 1970s. They seemed to fade out after a while, like most fads do. I had no idea they were still operating.

They still own and publish the Washington Times.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Washington_Times

What would happen at the retreat? Just indoctrination?

Very heavy pressure to join and indoctrination. The pressure tactics were very coercive. Essentially thought reform via a high control group/environment. Eventually people would think they made the choice to join themselves and had come to their own conclusions but in fact it was essentially are manipulation.

For those curious, the first article linked says it’s the Unification Church (Moonies).

Why aren't the major Japanese media outlets covering this angle before the polls close in Japan's upper house elections (today)?

It’s absolutely insane to me that people are criticizing the Japanese media over this. Why should we be amplifying a murder’s message? Don’t reward a man for shooting someone in the back.

After every mass shooting in the US I see widespread criticism of the media for sensationalism and turning mass murders into stars. Yet when another country follows this very advice, they’re criticized for a lack of free speech?

I would never criticize the media for indicating who did the killing, the weapon and how it was obtained, or the "mind set" (to the degree that is possible) of the killer. All of these things inform the populace. (And besides, does anyone think you could successfully suppress those?)

But of course I am not the "widespread criticism" you refer to.

It would be useful to point to the actual hypocrisy of a specific source/person — where this source/person was critical of the U.S. media amplifying a murderer's message but critical of Japan's refusal to do so.

Knowledge and transparency is oxygen to a democracy. Without an informed populace you can not have an effective democracy.

> Knowledge and transparency is oxygen to a democracy

Democracy can wait a week or two when a man is murdered that way

Freedom means also that you have to earn it, if people can't wait to speculate online about things that are still being investigated, they probably don't deserve it.

---

What if they waited a bit more before putting Lee Harvey Oswald on the front page of every newspaper? Maybe he would still be alive and we knew a lot more about what really happened.

What if Kennedy assassination happened today, with social media and the "pornography of violence"?

Think about it.

This. Usually calm people in Japan rage now about that news is slow. People should be calm even in this situation.

Isn’t it controversial whether or not he did have a connection? There is a value of free speech in Japan but it’s not exactly like America’s, and I think the Japanese media would mostly avoid stirring the pot immediately prior to an election, and especially for a claim that may be unfounded.

I won’t argue whether their approach is the right one or not and this is just my opinion, but that seems like that would be why the major papers wouldn’t want to cover this angle to me.

Controversial in the sense that he’s on video as a presenter in one of their events.

It’s as controversial as the My Pillow guy having a connection to a political party. We don’t know whether he literally believes in what he’s saying, but we do know he’s being paid to speak for them.

But whether this is the cult he was killed for is yet to be confirmed. He also had heavy involvement with Soka Gakkai through his alignment with the Komeito party. They also drain people of their cash.

> Isn’t it controversial whether or not he did have a connection?

Controversial like linking the Kashoggi's death to the Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman[1], but then participating to the G20 summit in Riyadh or selling them billions worth of weapons (including combat aircrafts), like nothing happened?

[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-56213528

They mean controversial in the sense of totally nonsensical distraction in which the stakes are basically zero.

Not controversial as in, "of any real consequence"

Strange. I don't see how it could be more controversial than his well known links to Nippon Kaigi.

I mean, the cult connection is only important for the fact that someone killed him for it. And I am going to guess that it tells you something about the deranged mind of the killer, and probably not much interesting about Abe.

Edit: I mean, come on, "newsflash: prominent politician involved in dubious business or accounting practices", you could probably have safely assumed it :)

It could be controversial because it's a Korean sect and Abe was a nationalist hardliner whose image was that he would make Japan "proud" again by refreezing relations with China and Korea.

So if he had connections to a Korean sect, and knowing what sects do, the next logical step would be to assume that he was controlled by or at least open to Korean interests, which is the opposite of what people elected him for, and would be a major, major scandal for him and his party.

It’s linked to too many hot button issues, and would have way more impact than just anger against a single cult.

If it was in the US context I would compare it to an alternative muslim cult founded in China and supporting the Palestinian regime. If someone shooting a US politician was found vaguely linked to that cult, it would be wiser to wait for a strong connection with the crime instead of just throwing around the information and have everyone go wild with the implications they want.

Only if it was supporting a muslims/chinese/palestinians who are known for their vociferous support of the republican party?

I mean, these groups tend to be ultra-right wing and the Korean ultra-right are very supportive of the japanese ultra-right wing, like Abe, who is grandson of Nobusuke Kishi, "the devil of manchuria" and thinks grandpa was a lovely guy.

Edit: Nobusuke, not Nobuo, Nobuo is the other grandson who is defence minister. My bad.

Unification Church of the World Peace [0]

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unification_Church

And that name is?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unification_Church

But it’s also in the submission, literally the first sentence…

Yes, but the the poster did the same what the newspapers he mentioned did - he avoided mentioning the religious group by name.

Thanks for linking to more information about it.

It really reminds me somehow of the police press relationship described in '64' (Rokuyon) by Hideo Yokoyama

NHK as of tonight have named the organization and broadcasted part of Abe's speech on TV.

translate.google to en:

[1] https://archive.is/4wu9v

[2] https://archive.is/xhOAW

Seems to me to be good policy not to discuss anything about assassins' motives, names or show photos to avoid accidentally glorifying the act or encouraging others who want to get attention. Why is the silence assumed to be a cover up instead of proper media etiquette?

Maybe, or maybe it’s just becoming obvious Japan’s “democracy” isn’t functioning at the level we’d all hope for that scares us all a little bit?

It's also quite chauvinist to suggest that the major newspapers cannot arrive at the same conclusion about disclosure independently, and pretty ignorant to imply that suppressing information is inconsistent with democracy.

> pretty ignorant to imply that suppressing information is inconsistent with democracy

It sort of is inconsistent with democracy. People should know for whom and for what they vote.

Is it? In most democracies in the world there are things you cannot publish even if they are true - Britain for example still maintains an official state censor, and even in the US there are still some state secrets that you cannot publish regardless of how true they are. Britain and many other countries also maintain a right to privacy that protects non-public-figure individuals against salacious soap-opera tabloid shit - you can't just go telling the whole world that Joe Q Public cheated on his wife, even if it's absolutely true because it's not a good idea for the panopticon to be pointed at the powerless like that.

Again, as should be said every time the topic comes up here on HN - the idealization of absolute and unlimited free speech is kind of a uniquely American phenomenon and even then it is not quite absolute. The rest of the world views freedom of speech as a right that needs to be limited and balanced like every other right.

Everyone has frequently talked about how we shouldn't be having media broadcast the manifestos of these shooters and glorifying them, how the media should just suppress information about them and refuse to publish their pictures and only and talk about them in the abstract... isn't that exactly what is going on here? This guy killed the prime minister and you want to know exactly what his cause was in exacting detail...

Britain’s an interesting case, but I don’t think it makes the point you think it does. Yes, there’s a censor, but the real reason all the newspapers report the same thing at the same time is cultural a) newspaper ownership is concentrated amongst a very small group of people, most of whom are billionaires b) they employ people who they trust to do the right thing c) journalism in the U.K. operates a revolving door with the conservative party’s communications division d) partly as a result of that and partly as a result of falling revenues, most journalist's idea of what good journalism is consists of asking two people what they think and reporting what they say e) this makes them extremely dependent on the lobby system, which is pretty similar to press clubs e) Blair set a precedent for cutting funding to the BBC if it said things it didn’t like, and the current government hasn’t hesitated to threaten to do it again f) this culture is so ingrained it has spread even to those publications that theoretically shouldn’t be affected.

So the situation in Japan is pretty similar to that in the U.K. You just need to identify the levers.

> and even in the US there are still some state secrets that you cannot publish regardless of how true they are

That is simply not true. There are many examples where USA newspapers published leaked secrets and the journalist were not convicted for it in any case.

The Pentagon Papers come to mind as the most famous example: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentagon_Papers

"Again, as should be said every time the topic comes up here on HN - the idealization of absolute and unlimited free speech is kind of a uniquely American phenomenon and even then it is not quite absolute."

Yeah, I just got smacked down on here for suggesting that not sharing all the details, naming names, etc could be because they don't want to encourage copycats, and that the US could address some of it's violence via a law limiting the details they provide.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5296697/

Yes, there is information that should not be printed, including that which clearly harms national security, like the locations of all the nuclear missiles. In the US, this happens by voluntary cooperation by the press. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_of_Censorship

This specific story is not one of them. It is useful to society to understand that cults destroying individuals' financial security can make them desperate enough to assassinate.

>even in the US there are still some state secrets that you cannot publish regardless of how true they are.

Sunlight is the best disinfectant. The "powers that be" have gotten drunk on their ability to not only hide information from the public, but more often than not to muddy it by releasing floods of false information so that people don't know what is what.

These are the same people we owe things like Operation Northwoods and MK-Ultra to, so they can't be trusted.

Not necessarily backing the decision of the Japanese newspapers here, but US politics is basically a circus of unsubstantiated allegations which are front and center because they get more eyeballs. Sensationalism is hardly a pillar of democracy. It's a scourge and the country would be better off if Fox, MSNBC, Twitter's apocalypse algorithms etc. were a little more reserved.

This is a lot of words for the basic conjecture that he was killed by/for being a moonie.

The problem with this reporting is that it takes the killer's supposed words at face value. This is a big risk, especially as at this stage we are not entirely certain that those words are accurate.

Now, this may eventually appear to be the case, but the level of certainty presented in this article is unfounded.

This article is within the more general context, but we have the words of the assassin, discussion by the police of not wanting to discuss the church specifically for the “obvious” reasons, the mother of the assassin being identified by the church as being a member… “it happened because of X” is maybe very strong but lots of the story does align and is being corroborated.

What were the words of the assassin?

> “My family joined that religion and our life became harder after donating money to the organization,” Tetsuya Yamagami, who is unemployed, was quoted by the sources as telling police. “I had wanted to target the top official of the organization, but it was difficult. So, I took aim at Abe since I believed that he was tied (to the organization). I wanted to kill him.”

https://www.asahi.com/ajw/articles/14665352

Thank you! But, that seems to not say which religion it is?

The problem is also the title. It treats the killer as a non-agent with no free will, and is an implicit justification of political violence. "The crime that killed Abe" is known as "homicide", not "predecessor's political decisions".

> He adds that Shintaro Abe, Kishi’s son and Shinzo Abe’s father, “depended upon ‘Moonies’ in his election campaigns.”

They got the family situation wrong. Shintaro Abe is Nobusuke Kishi’s son-in-law not his son.

From Wikipedia:

> Shintaro Abe married Yoko Kishi [ja], daughter of Prime Minister Nobusuke Kishi, in 1951.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shintaro_Abe

Seems like the article has been fixed already. That was fast.

The Moonies, often represented in America by some unfortunate Korean boy or girl, beg for money at American universities in exchange for food and lodging. It's essentially human trafficking and indentured servitude because they're trapped in a foreign country.

So, if see someone who doesn't speak English who shoved a photo montage flip book clipboard of deprivation in front of you, think twice before giving them money because you'd be supporting the late George Bush Sr's 2nd-favorite cult.

They also own The Washington Times and United Press International (UPI).

And True World Foods, which runs a major portion of the sushi trade in the US.

Numerous other innocent-sounding organizations in many, many sports, interest groups, and industries.

Net worth around $2 billion.

They don't own the Canadian Globe and Mail which repeats some of the comments about the media in Japan and highlights some questions about the Abe/(Moonie aka Unification Church aka Family Federation) relationship.

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/world/article-tetsuya-yamaga...

The Spiegel didn't have much good to say about Abe either. The first article on their front page (when news of his death became known) was not a nice obituary. It might also reflect the huge gap between the way Germany responded to WWII and the way Japan did.

https://www.spiegel.de/ausland/shinz-abe-nachruf-der-japanis...

Is it a requirement for every Asian cult to own a few American newspapers? I know of two others

Don't you dare besmirch The Epoch Times.

Edit: People don't understand /s. Poe's law strikes again.

Also, The Christian Science Monitor does a terrible job monitoring Christian Science and Christianity, but they do alright on science. They're absolutely flying off the handle with their obvious slant towards uncontroversial, neutral, factual reporting. Those bastards.

I hope no one misses the implied /s regarding CSM.

The Christian Science Monitor is a model of great reporting in a time when few models exist.

I am saddened when someone downplays a CSM report as biased because the listener assumes some form of Christian fundamentalism.

Wow, CSM, that's a name I haven't thought of in a long time. Over a decade ago while I was still in college I worked for a local web dev shop and I worked on their website (csmonitor.com). I can barely remember what I was doing, minor UI stuff and I think maybe spinning up more sites in their "network". IIRC it was a WordPress multisite (if that's even the right name, back when the "multisite" was a plugin though I think there is some core support now? Not sure).

I knew absolutely nothing about them and more than once I took down parts of their live site by accident (back in the bad old days of FTP-ing files directly to the prod server, there was no "dev"/"qa"/etc). At some point along the way I read a little more about them and was pretty disgusted by it all. Thankfully that work didn't last for very long and I was moved to other projects.

no requirement, just smart business

Last I checked American newspapers were not profit centers, so business is likely not the motivation - other than perhaps the value of controlling media in terms of propaganda, i.e. narrative control, which may be of value to other businesses owned by the entity. (Jeff Bezos buying the Washington Post, for example, is only a 'good business decision' in the context of providing a platform that enhances the business interests of Amazon (which seeks to avoid unionization) and AWS (which seeks expanded government contracts)).

your second point was the main point in my admittedly overly cryptic comment.

Narrative control + amplification power + even brand awareness = revenue opportunity. For example, The Epoch Times, the media mouthpiece of Falun Gong, promotes Shen Yun, the Chinese Dance troupe showcasing the 'beauty of China before Communism'. Propaganda and Profit need each other

Can you tell about the two others?

The Epoch Times is owned by Falun Gong. (They are apocalyptic/UFO/meditation cult, they have been banned in China and, if you believe their claims, organ harvested. I don’t know how much to believe those claims, but China does keep a lot of things with organs weirdly secret. FG are present at every anti-Chinese protest. They also do the Chinese ballet which name I forgot now…. ah yeah Shen Yun)

I don’t know any other.

I'm guessing the other one, besides Falun Gong and the Unification Church, is Olivet Church, a Korean messianic sect that bought Newsweek.

https://www.motherjones.com/media/2014/03/newsweek-ibt-olive...

They aren't nearly as influential as you might think, especially in modern times. Maybe they were during the cold war or when they protested in support of Nixon. Their media reach is pretty limited, The Washington Times has a small number of readers.

Edit: to the comment about $2B: that's almost mostly belonging to the founder who takes his money from followers. $2B is 130k a person when we're talking about 15,000 followers.

A big reason they aren't as influential anymore is because Reverend Moon died, and there is currently a battle royale going on between his widow and some of his batshit insane kids [1] over his fortune.

The True World Foods story is truly fascinating to me. Since slavery is illegal, better to get true believers to work long and hard nearly for free.

1. https://www.the-sun.com/news/us-news/2977349/inside-maga-sup...

This article [1] is a bit more informative on the history and soap-opera dynastic schism.

I don't have firsthand knowledge of it all, but I do know some ex-Moonies who've spoken of their efforts to safely detach their still-adherent relatives.

1. https://washingtoncitypaper.com/article/530522/lengthy-lawsu...

They might not be as wealthy or powerful as other religious sects, but them being a cult is still of concern because by nature they are 1) secretive and non-transparent, 2) capable of fierce organizational discipline including taking advantage of members, 3) operate via proselytizing including underhanded means, 4) open to extremist and authoritarian beliefs. That's in the very nature of cults. Add that to their historically-potent political influence from the Cold War, and they're still worthy of investigation.

Their political strength is decreasing in the US, while Falun Gong's is on the rise. Both have similar political goals. Falun Gong is the cult that owns right wing rag The Epoch Times and puts on the Shen Yun show.

NYT did a great article on True World Foods: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/11/05/magazine/sush...

Archive version: https://archive.ph/ZAy6D

Pod version: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/the-sunday-read-the-un...

YouTube version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5EqHuAJYdr8

I found this list of companies affiliated with the Moonies (many defunct).

https://culteducation.com/unif121.html

Here is an interesting quote by someone who ran two of these businesses in the SF bay area.

"'With no labor costs and people willing to work 14 to 15 hours a day, you can undercut anybody' he said. Scales said that when he ran the Aladdin restaurants, employees signed over their pay-checks to the personal slush fund of West Coast church leader"

The article was from 1977 - and the Moonies tried to reform themselves later, but at that time they were slave labor businesses. Moon was able to shield his practices using his tax exempt status as a religious organisation.

Replace "Moonie" with any mainstream religion and mention of race with the race such religion most widely applies to, and I hope the bigotry of this comment becomes far more clear.

Eh..not really. Moonie is a specific religious sect (and a horrible, vile, dim-witted one without sugar-coating). If you ask me, they should be singled out and massively shamed for their atrocities.

Mainstream religions like Christianity and Islam have billions of adherents between them and aren't a single group. They're many sub-sets within them, many of whom aren't fond of each other, so you can't generalize with that case.

Call it "bigotry"...but what else can we say about a "church" whose adherents bless their AR-15 and wear a crown of bullets [1]. It's not bigotry to be scared of such loons and the kind of havoc they can potentially cause.

Religious freedom does not give people the authority to be nuisances within their community.

1- https://www.vox.com/2018/3/1/17067894/church-bullet-crowns-a...

This article is specifically about Moonies though. I've also heard first hand accounts of that exact situation happening in the town where I went to college many years ago.

I’m not saying anything about the content of the article, the article is fine. I am remarking on the commenters bigoted tone, and how people let it slide because it’s a religion they are unfamiliar with.

I agree with you on "replace it with any religion" but I don't find it bigotry necessarily - I am averse to any and all religious influence on anything, and I'm happy to see it brought up to attention and awareness everywhere. As to the frequent Venn diagram overlap of locally predominant religion with corresponding country / nationality / ethnicity / etc, while that frequently the case, I agree we should focus on the underlying viral meme that's religion and not the confounding variable of nationality.

I mean, I've lived in Canada for 20 years before I've realized that friendly kids asking for donation for salvation army in super markets are in fact members of a massive church. Things some people find obvious aren't well known to others.

> think twice before giving them money because you'd be supporting the late George Bush Sr's 2nd-favorite cult.

> They also own The Washington Times and United Press International (UPI).

> And True World Foods, which runs a major portion of the sushi trade in the US.

> Numerous other innocent-sounding organizations in many, many sports, interest groups, and industries.

Like if someone wrote any of that about Jews, there would be no doubt in anyone's mind that they were an anti-semite.

Nobusuke Kishi (Abe's grandfather) has an extremely interesting backstory:

> As a self-described "playboy of the Eastern world", Kishi was known during his four years in Manchukuo for his lavish spending amid much drinking, gambling, and womanizing.[34] Kishi spent almost all of his time in Manchukuo's capital, Hsinking (modern Changchun, China) with the exception of monthly trips to Dalian on the world famous Asia Express railroad line, where he indulged in his passion for women in alcohol- and sex-drenched weekends.[29] When not visiting the brothels of Manchuria, Kishi was demanding sex from the waitresses who served him at the expensive restaurants he patronized. When he was locked up in Sugamo prison in 1946 awaiting trial, he reminisced about his Manchukuo years: “I came so much, it was hard to clean it all up”.[29] According to Driscoll, "photographs and written descriptions of Kishi during this period never fail to depict a giddy exuberance: laughing and joking while doling out money during the day and looking forward to drinking and fornicating at night."[35] Kishi was able to afford his hedonistic, free-spending lifestyle as he had control over millions of yen with virtually no oversight, alongside being deeply involved in and profiting from the opium trade.[30] Before returning to Japan in October 1939, Kishi is reported to have advised his colleagues in the Manchukuo government about corruption: "Political funds should be accepted only after they have passed through a 'filter' and been 'cleansed'. If a problem arises, the 'filter' itself will then become the center of the affair, while the politician, who has consumed the 'clean water', will not be implicated. Political funds become the basis of corruption scandals only when they have not been sufficiently 'filtered.'"[4]

> At the same time, Kishi repeatedly expressed a disdain for Chinese people as impure and unclean.[32] One of Kishi's closest friends and business partners, the yakuza gangster Yoshio Kodama, summed up his boss's thinking about the Chinese as follows: "We Japanese are like pure water in a bucket; different from the Chinese who are like the filthy Yangtze river. But be careful. If even the smallest amount of shit gets into our bucket, we become totally polluted. Since all the toilets in China empty into the Yangtze, the Chinese are soiled forever. We, however, must maintain our purity".[33]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobusuke_Kishi

"extremely interesting backstory" is definitely one way to describe Nobusuke Kishi's time as the army officer who was in charge of Manchukuo. "Vile history" is the phrase I'd personally use.

Even vile doesn't quite cover the scale of the horror, especially Unit 731

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_crimes_in_Manchukuo

I read the Unit 731 Wikipedia page recently and almost wished I hadn’t. Im surprised I’d never heard about it and neither had any of my friends. Not that it’s a competition, but some of the atrocities I read about on that page were worse than any other World War atrocity I know and it seems like it’s just been swept under the rug.

> Kishi's time as the army officer

He wasn't an army officer. He was a lawyer/bureaucrat in charge of the forced industrialization of Manchukuo after studying the economic systems of places like Wiemar Germany, and was given total authority by the army to run this vertical as he saw fit.

Thank you for the correction, mea culpa

There's definitely a culture of brothels that still exists thats pretty foreign to the West. You won't really hear about it because Japanese people don't just offer there stories up to foreigners... but I've had sources inform me of places where people can go for orgies (in a way Americans may casually visit a strip club which is a toned down version of this) and I believe in some cases can even be expensed to the business as entertainment.

Yeah the orgy places are one of the worst kept secrets here. Everyone knows they exists, but it's not really spoken of. I had a friend (Japanese) that was invited and he just explained it as being weird. The place he went to just had glass rooms full of naked folks doing things naked people tend to do together. It was a combination of an orgy and a voyeur event.

Underground life in Japan can get pretty extreme. Typically foreigners aren't privy or allowed in such environments. Not saying it doesn't happen, though.

Watching “Midnight Diner” on Netflix I was struck by a much more casual acceptance of stripping and prostitution than I would have expected.

I'm not sure how much that reflects general attitudes. That show is also set in Shinjuku which I believe houses a lot of strip clubs and other similar activites.

interesting. any books or websites to find out more about this culture?

I hadn't realized but it's sometimes even mentioned in some of Haruki Murakami's stories.

Today I've learned about Asia Express, which had air conditioned cars in the 30s and ran on what looks like a branch of Russian-built China Eastern Raiway.

China is a source of, a threat of and competitor of china. It has tried to invade japan (and japan to Korea plus the whole china). This geo-political game will be played out in the coming decades, with Taiwan, Korea and USA all in.

Individual… some of the grands of his as prime minister important.

Sex part not that much. The founder of modern china has a few Japanese women and even had a daughter there. Not to mention his well known name is actually adopted from his Japanese name.

The article ends implying the Japanese media is wrong by downplaying and leaving out the name of the church, but when I was reading more on wikipedia about the Unification Church they referenced this article from the media, which I will need to translate but would seem to refute this:

https://gendai.ismedia.jp/articles/-/97322

For those who are in Japan is that a good take by the author of the submitted article? Is (edit: it fair to say) the media hiding the connection?

I am in Japan, have been watching the news, and this is the first time I’d seen the Unification Church named as the motive. My impression has also been that the domestic media is downplaying the connection.

Naming a cult on media is a taboo in Japan, for fear of retaliations and verbal abuses than as common courtesy.

There even used to be a P2P app called Perfect Dark, known in a... different... name early on, so as to make it 'immune to police prosecution'. Eventually the name changed to what it is, and stories of police working on it did start appearing. That was 2010s.

What was the previous name of Perfect Dark?

it was called "Share" and before that there was WinNy, a fork of the WinMX p2p client.

It was a four letter name that I’m not comfortable posting here…

Perfect dark still exists.

Gendai is regarded in Japan as a "tabloid" (think National Enquirer). So the mainstream media in Japan can be accused of hiding the connection.

More explanation here: https://twitter.com/wdavidmarx/status/1545956836310159360

Thank you, I am sure there is a lot of context I don’t understand as an outsider.

Japanese people I know are adamant that Abe had no ties or did ever voice support for the Moon sect, ever. I am now wondering if Abe had kept it secret and the shooter somehow found out.

If the cult ruined his life and he took it out on the first politician he could somehow link to them, the problem is not whether such politician really had such relationship, but the fact that such idea was credible in the first place. Are cults in Japan tolerated a bit too much, leaving them free to ruin's people lives? Are politicians just sitting by, or even enabling such cults? Those should be the questions people have to ask, if the aim is to avoid a repeat. This is particularly true when you look at the fact that such cults were directly responsible for past terrorist activity in Japan.

>Are cults in Japan tolerated a bit too much

This one is still around, albeit at the fringes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aum_Shinrikyo

" Shoko Asahara, the leader of the Aum Shinrikyo doomsday cult, was hanged after being sentenced to death in 2004"

For real cult tolerance look no further than S.Korea. Any innocent social gathering has >50% chance of being cult recruitment gathering.

Also the „Happy Science“ cult which has racial segregation and Japan ruling the Earth as its ulterior motives.

Probably cults freedoms are tolerated for votes

I read he gave a speech there once. Maybe the killer heard about it and, combined with whatever mental illness he has, interpreted it as something more than it was.

In the US, Mike Pompeo (ex Secretary of State), Mike Pence (ex Vice President), and Trump (ex-President) have also given speeches to an offshoot of the Moonies...wild.

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2021/05/pence-pompeo-he...

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politic...

I know loads who know about this. The guy was in a publicly published video last year, it’s not a massive secret.

Ah, interesting. I suspected that I got a "save face" answer from them because they always err on the side of "Japan and Japanese people can't be criticised by Western people".

Abe-unification relation is well written by some media so it can be easily found, but maybe not well known for who only watch TV and newspaper.

In the very link this post is about, there's a Youtube video of Abe giving a speech for the church in 2021.

For the sake of objectivity, Shinzo Abe was killed by Tetsuya Yamagami and there is no excuse or justification for this murder.

As an incidental remark:

I find it remarkable that on the surface I now know of three G7 countries / liberal democracies where the PM/President is the (grand)son of a PM/President himself.

Bush Sr - Bush Jr

Pierre Trudeau - Justin Trudeau

Nobusuke Kishi - (Shintaro Abe; FM) - Shinzo Abe

[Honorary mention: France with "Le Pen" both father & daughter made it to the second round in the presidential elections (2002; 2017 and 2022)]

It's a disturbing trend and indicative of failing health / vibrancy of political systems. Same with running Hilary Clinton.

Half of the entire point of the democratic turn in western states after the enlightenment and the French revolution was to attempt take power away from powerful families and abolish heritable power.

I found it very alarming when Trudeau Jr was plucked out of relative obscurity and turned into a political figure here, and I found it quite absurd that he won with hardly any experience or qualification beyond his family name.

Especially when the other centre-left opposition candidate at the time (Mulcair&the NDP) was very strong, an extremely competent opposition leader with strong support in Quebec, a long political history and a strong base, and the NDP were polling in majority territory prior to (and in the early part) the election. Honestly, I'm still bitter about that election and its results. I think it's actually turned out disastrous for Canada.

Politicians don't really need to be good at policy. They have people to do that. They just need to be charismatic - able to capture the imagination of a constituency, and able to persuade other politicians to support their platform.

Of course it'd be nice if our politicians were well-educated in the details of the policies they are championing, and if they could independently reason about the pros and cons, but realistically that's not what they're there for. They're like the sales guys at work - they might have some personal interest in techy details, but it's not what they're hired to do or what they excel at. They're hired to make the sales, not the product.

I think the party strategists who picked a pretty face and a familiar name to represent the party did a decent job. Trudeau continues to have the confidence of most of his party, which is why he's still in the leadership position. He's clearly inoffensive enough that he can maintain support inside the party while also not igniting enough of a backlash amongst the voting public to indisputably defeat his party in 2021. He might be a milquetoast character representing an ideologically unadventurous party, but perhaps that's all he's meant to be?

Honestly right now it feels like the Liberal Party is completely asleep at the wheel and there's a total absence of leadership at the moment and lots of ministerial files seem completely unmanaged or poorly managed.

They were able to ride out the pandemic with some overall reasonable policies, and most of the stuff that annoyed people fell on the provinces.

But they're clearly having a hard time transitioning now, and the Singh giving them a blank check has made them extra complacent. The stuff at the airports on its own is inexcusable. ArriveCAN needs to go. They need to respond boldly to this Rogers fiasco from Friday. They feel entirely flat footed to me.

The expiration date is all over Trudeau and he needs to do the right thing and GTFO. And he needs to do it in a way that doesn't stiff Freeland and leave her in a Kim Campbell or Kathleen Wynne or Paul Martin type position.

He needs to announce his resignation ASAP and call a leadership convention even if it's a coronation for Freeland.

Singh I think has cost the NDP pretty much almost all their seats in the next election by propping Trudeau up right now. I have always voted NDP but I don't know what I'll do next time around.

I say this as a left wing voter who doesn't want to see the Conservatives in charge. But every day they hold on they're just giving the Conservatives more momentum, even without a leader.

I think when strategists look back they'll see Trudeau as a mistake. It got them power, but he was no Chretien or Trudeau Sr. He has been weak on policy and on leadership. And it will cost them in the long run. They blew their 3 gov'ts by basically getting almost nothing actually done on all their files they were so boldly proclaiming. It reminds me a lot of McGuinty's term: at the end most of the problems created by Mike Harris still hadn't been reversed. I feel the same way about this gov't and the Harper years.

CO2 Emissions? Up. A lot. Indigenous reconciliation? Nope. Clean water to all reserves? Nope. And what they have accomplished (small carbon taxes, subsidized daycare) seems very vulnerable to immediate reversal on day one of a conservative gov't.

Politicians need to pick skilled policymakers. This can be done either by being good at policy themselves so that they can identify this skill in others, or by having above average people skills so they can identify it that way.

> It's a disturbing trend and indicative of failing health / vibrancy of political systems.

If this is an indicator, how long has the U.S. political system been failing? John Adams was the second President starting in 1797. His son became the sixth President in 1825.

It surely goes in cycles in the US.

Also arguably the US's republican model has had some of the weakest "democratic" aspects. Its popular veneration of the President as a martial pseudo-king "Command in Chief" (very weird to watch from up here in Canada, BTW, esp during the Bush post-9/11 years), its blatant blurring of church & state, its obsession with its military, its overt and obsequious patriotism and national chauvinism, its expanding federal powers, its imperial ambitions (both internal to the Americas and then even further abroad after WWII), its history with slavery and racial discrimination, etc.

It's a contradictory country. On one hand having some of the most radical and egalitarian motive forces, and being earlier to the democratic impulse than most of the west. On the other hand having ossified authoritarian impulses built deep into its system.

I think you'll find more healthy democracies in western Europe and Canada, though they don't have the same radical liberal (small, classical l) ideological underpinnings.

I disagree regarding Hillary Clinton, I think it's a disservice to her academic and professional accomplishments. She has an impressive academic record at Yale while getting her JD, was a very popular senator in NY, and was widely respected SoS. She is far more qualified than most presidential candidates and probably more qualified than her husband. I know she is divisive and I'm going to be downvoted, but all those accomplishments are factual and I left things out. I wish people would pause and reflect about why they dislike her.

I also disagree with you about Trudeau, almost to the point I would characterize your description of him as false. He started in the HoC 15 years ago, took that to a leadership position in a failing Liberal party and revitalized them. I think it's more problematic that Harper led a lobbying group for several years.. I am curious what you think has been disastrous? (never mind, I see your sibling comment) I think he is actually impressively aware of the political coordination with the American and Canadian right-wings.

If I'm understanding you right, it's more of a problem with machine politics, and I'd agree with you. The solution has always been restrictions on donations, advertising, and otherwise limiting the influence of money on politics but that fight has mostly failed.

I agree Clinton actually has a fairly impressive record. But so did plenty of other people.

My point remains regardless: it is corrosive to democracy to let power consolidate in family power centres. Many kings and emperors of antiquity were very competent. And successful powerful families cultivated competency at ruling through elite education and patronage etc. But it was still a terrible form of government. Not the least because it becomes self-serving over time, but also because of its injustice: all the very competent people passed over because they did not have the right name or connections.

Having a healthy democracy (literally: "people's rule") requires us to explicitly counteract concentration of power in lineage systems, party bureaucracies, and corporate dominance. Of these family lineage is one of the easiest to spot.

Yes, we've always had this. No, it's not a good thing. And we need to actively counteract it, even if it means passing up very competent individuals.

I liked Herbert's books, I don't want to live in the Dune universe :-)

Mulcair was anything but strong. Everyone knew going into the 2015 election that the Orange Wave would recede. Mulcair's whole mission was to salvage enough of the wreck to make it not look downright embarassing. To do this he started softcore pandering to Quebec sovereignism, culminating in an utterly humiliating moment in the debates when he arrogantly grilled Trudeau about the threshold definition for Quebec sovereignty to happen: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zwtU4KGGYVU

Wanna know how the NDP blew the majority polls early in that election? Yep, it was Mulcair, who was anything but strong.

Politics in its modern form is often a full-time job. To climb the ladder often means one must start early, yet this job is anything but stable. Most regular families can't really afford the risk or downsides. Political dynasties have the advantage of existing connections, as well as inter-generational resources that aren't available in other families. In this video https://youtu.be/XqjQ6gqgi0w?t=41 you can see Trudeau Jr.'s behaviour was clearly groomed for attending public functions. This was a headstart that many others don't have when they go into politics well into adulthood. The same phenomenon is present in Japan, just at a much larger extent. Social connections is an asset without form, and naturally it can get passed down generations like other assets. Why abandon them when they can be used advance your career. Unless we adopt ancient Athenian procedures of ostracism, political dynasties will exist. And ostracism will not happen because it was idiotic and backfired badly.

Justin Trudeau had been a MP for 5 years when he became the Liberal leader. Their party was in crisis mode after a decade of consecutive seat losses. Trudeau was the button behind their "break in case of emergency" glass, and it worked for them because the same effect resonated with the voter base.

Modern politicians in developed elective democratic countries aren't benevolent despots, and no single person's brain has the capacity to process or react to everything going on in the world at this day and age. This means they have lots of advisors to handle most of that processing and decision suggestions. The relief of this burden means a good modern politican doesn't have to be good at policy - they become another type of influencer whose first and foremost focus is charisma. Zelensky is another example.

In Japan, feudalism never really ended, at least not in the hearts and minds of people. They love their „upper caste“ regardless how much it hurts their lives.

You can add Trump to that list as well, though it isn't a genetic inheritance. Chomsky's Requiem for the American Dream lays out in detail how intertwined the Trump family has been in conservative national politics for ages

This happens all over the world. The new president of Philippines is the son of a former president. In Pakistan two members of the Bhutto family have been PM and another was president. In Chile there was the Allende family, in America there is the Kennedys and the Clintons and dozens more examples below the presidency.

I don't think it should be surprising that politicians can have family members who also make a career in politics. The same thing happens with public figures like actors, musicians and sports people. But it also happens with doctors and lawyers and soldiers and police and bakers and plumbers and hair stylists.

Although there are plenty of people who grow up to do something different from their parents, there is definitely motivation to "follow in the footsteps". If nothing else, you can probably leverage a built-in support network.

The question that's important for democracy is if it's possible for someone to break in to a political system if they are not a member of a pre-existing dynasty. So far I think in most countries that is still the case. Certainly it's better than feudal times.

> In Chile there was the Allende family

A much better example would be the Frei family, with both Eduardo Frei Montalva and his son, Eduardo Frei Ruiz-Tagle, having served as presidents and several other members having different political positions. Frei Montalva, by the way, preceded Salvador Allende.

Not a G7, but India notably is the most populous democracy in the world: Rajiv Gandhi, 6th Prime Minister of India, son of Indira Gandhi who was 3rd Prime Minister of India, who herself was daughter of Jawaharlal Nehru, the 1st prime minister of India.

basically a glorified monarchy, then, since rich families have access to better ads/PR around their candidacies

Rajiv Gandhi’s wife Sonia and son Rahul are also major political figures in India.

The U.S. had John and John Quincy Adams and William Henry and Benjamin Harrison. Al Gore was the son of a Senator, and John F Kennedy's family had numerous high-profile politicians, including his father being US Ambassador to the UK. This is not a new development. Not saying it's good, just that it's not new.

You get automatic name recognition by being the child of a former leader, and that applies even if the former leader was unpopular. The hardest thing in national politics is probably becoming, essentially, known in the first place, so they start with a colossal advantage.

This, and I’d imagine politics is like anything else: you would really benefit from having people who’ve been there before to help you navigate. It’s the same reason why a lot of children of pro athletes become pro athletes.

I imagine that genetics is probably the biggest reason for athletes.

This situation is incredibly well covered by the book that I just finished called The Aristocracy of Talent - How Meritocracy Made the Modern World By Adrian Wooldridge. It is a riveting read covering the history of how power was passed through (father->son) for a long time, how it changed with meritocracy in last 200 years and how it is currently going back, with a twist. Great review https://www.city-journal.org/review-of-the-aristocracy-of-ta.... A worthy and very relevant read for current troubled times

It's important to keep in mind that this might be less sinister than it first appears (or more...there's that interpretation too). The "Great families" idea reaches beyond politics into science and art as well: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/secrets-of-the-great-f....

Thought provoking. I would love to see that article extended to include artists - e.g. musicians like Johann Sebastian Bach, whose father Johann Ambrosius Bach was a violinist employed in Erfurt (who was twin brother to Johann Christoph Bach another great Baroque musician). These brothers were the sons of Christoph Bach, court musician in Germany. On the descendent side, Johann's fifth child and second surviving son Karl Philipp Emmanuel Bach (C. P. E. Bach) - the "Hamburg Bach" - was a musician and influential composer. His brother, Johann Christian Bach, or the "London Bach" (the 18th child of Johann Sebastian!), was music master to the Queen of Great Britain. There's more [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bach_family

I see that P.D.Q. Bach is still being ignored and treated as some kind of joke. The Wikipedia article doesn’t even mention him.

Agreed, the Bach clan has to be one of the top families to have left off! Maybe the other Bachs are only well known to classical music lovers though.

I don't think it's that weird. You wouldn't think much of a famous cook being the son of another famous cook, or likewise for a famous athlete, chess player, religious leader, etc. A child is influenced by their parents through both nature (genetics) and nurture (childrearing).

Of course stuff like connections, name recognition, favors and backroom deals are a thing as well which are various levels of bad and preventable.

A politician isn't like a cook, or an athlete, or a flute player, or a pilot.

That claim was why the Athenians - rightly - called Socrates an idiot. One who didn't understand the point of protecting his interest through participating in politics.

A politician isn't supposed to administrate, he's supposed to represent people's interests - those who elected him in our system. He doesn't pilot the ship, he says where the ship should go in the first place. To the degree mere competence is required, he can hire someone to help him.

When family dynasties happen in politics, it's doubly a bad sign. First, there's no reason to think the son of a representative is accurately representative just because the father was. There's always the risk that he could be advancing private interests at the expense of the public he represents. And second: that the son is even there, is itself evidence that the father may have done just that, advancing his family interest over the public's.

There's different ways to think about it but it's pretty rare for both a patent and child to be great athletes, at least in the same sport. It happens, there's exceptions.

Michael Jordan's sons didn't play professional basketball. For elite sports, having an elite athlete parent has low predictive power.

Pro athletes beget pro athletes All. The. Time.

Cherry picking some of the NBAs MVPs, you might not remember Dell Curry[0], but you probably know one or both(!) of his sons who play in the NBA. Or there's Joe Bryant[1] whose son eclipsed his career in the NBA.

Or, here's a fun sport switching family. Sometimes the athletic gene is so strong, four of the great-grandsons go pro.[2]

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dell_Curry [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_Bryant [2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignatius_Gronkowski

It's ridiculous. I'd never vote for a president's relative as the next president. It's a matter of hygiene. There must be other equally (more) suitable candidates.

Voting for relatives gives us presidents like Bush Jr.

Having a familiar name should become a negative instead of a positive for a politician. Voters should assume they're just riding their famous relative's coattails unless clearly proven otherwise.

It's especially crazy considering who Nobusuke Kishi was, and the things he did.

Known for his exploitative rule of the Japanese puppet state of Manchukuo in Northeast China in the 1930s, Kishi was nicknamed the "Monster of the Shōwa era" (昭和の妖怪; Shōwa no yōkai).[1] Kishi later served in the wartime cabinet of Prime Minister Hideki Tōjō as Minister of Commerce and Vice Minister of Munitions,[2] and co-signed the declaration of war against the United States on December 7, 1941.

After World War II, Kishi was imprisoned for three years as a suspected Class A war criminal. However, the U.S. government did not charge, try, or convict him, and eventually released him as they considered Kishi to be the best man to lead a post-war Japan in a pro-American direction. With U.S. support, he went on to consolidate the Japanese conservative camp against perceived threats from the Japan Socialist Party in the 1950s. Kishi was instrumental in the formation of the powerful Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) through a merger of smaller conservative parties in 1955, and thus is credited with being a key player in the initiation of the "1955 System", the extended period during which the LDP was the overwhelmingly dominant political party in Japan.[3][4]

As prime minister, Kishi's mishandling of the 1960 revision of the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty led to the massive 1960 Anpo protests, which were the largest protests in Japan's modern history and which forced him to resign in disgrace.

[0] - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobusuke_Kishi

In Japan, anything but political dynasties would be seen as „not normal“ by the voters. Politician is a family business like an Udon restaurant - the eldest son of a politician is expected to become a politician, too. And many of these dynasties go back to feudal times or earlier. In Japan, I heard more that once about some scandal-addled politician that „he comes from a samurai family“. That means he’s above law in the Western sense. What ever bad thing such a person does - a showy apology and a deep bow will heal all wounds with the majority of voters.

One might reach the conclusion that this sort of thing is human nature. Not all natural inclinations are good...

Speaking of family cronyism, cults and assassinations lets not forget SKorea Park Geun-hye and her father Park Chung-hee.

Not just G7, it's so common in many democratic nations. Wonder if anyone did a study of democracy and nepotism.

Singapore is even more interesting with Lee Kuan Yew and Lee Hsien Long.

Singapore is a flawed democracy at best.

Not on G7 of course but you should check Greece.

Am I naive to believe that an article with such title would at least looked into assassins claims to begin with? Like how much was donated for starters, history of mental illnesses, gambling, and so on. Instead we start with Nixon and Kissinger

I would like to wait more for more information. This speculation seems incomplete and premature, and in the end, likely, inaccurate.

Political assassinations rarely stem from one particular situation or event, but accumulation of beliefs and world view over a long period of time. He may stated his disdain for Abe to be his connection with the religious organization, but that can easily be just one of many reasons that he believes have re-enforced him to commit assassination.

The assassin went through a lot of trouble and difficulty building his own gun and ammos. I think it's probably more likely that there's more political and ideological motivation behind his action than just Abe's roundabout connection to the church that ruined his mother. It's just too speculative and unlikely for now until there's more evidence.

The assassin stated that he killed Abe due to his association with a "certain group", so this theory lines up nicely. Of course it's all speculation until we hear from the suspect themselves.

Update: the suspect has now confirmed. https://japantoday.com/category/crime/update2-abe-shooter-sa...

This is a great point, the 'motivation' seems incredibly shallow and one dimensional.

"Why the Japanese media has refused to identify the 'religious group' that formed the motive for the killing must remain as speculation at this juncture, though it reflects very poorly on Japan’s status as a democratic nation."

I'm struggling to understand the author's bias here (there clearly is one), are they claiming that the poor reflection on Japan as a democracy is:

- that the media has not reported an unsubstantiated 'speculation'? (sounds like good journalism?)

- that that politicians have religious beliefs? (separation of religion and state shouldn't forbid religious people holding office, just from mandating it)

- that the murderer was anti-religiously motivated? (sign of a hate crime)

The 3rd I believe. The point of the article is to show Abe's connection to the church through political alliances developed since his grandfather and the Japanese media is at some level seeking to downplay the prevalence of anti-religious extremism.

This is a strange article with an odd angle.

They guy initially wanted to avenge the family’s misfortune by targeting someone high up in the church which he blamed for unscrupulously taking their money, when they proved too difficult (inaccessible) he turned his attention to mr Abe who was associated with the church and was out campaigning making for an easy target.

The article starts with an arc where a friendship two generations ago directly lead to a grandsons death. It’s a tool and trope for prose, but not apt for journalism.

It’d be like an article about mr Pelosi’s accident starting off with the Porsche company’s founding and how that eventually resulted in drunken driving accident by mr Pelosi.

There is lots to unpack and discover regarding the assassination of mr Abe but I feel this journalist is grinding some axe on the way there.

This is repeatedly reported news, not one journalist.

According to Japanese police, the shooter claimed Abe's religious group association was the motive. At least two other papers have linked that group to the Family Federation (formerly Unification Church) and the Family Federation issued a PR newswire about the shooting yesterday after refusing to comment.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/jul/09/shinzo-abe-bod...

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/world/article-tetsuya-yamaga...

https://www.stripes.com/theaters/asia_pacific/2022-07-10/mot...

Here is the Church's statement:

https://www.djournal.com/unification-church-statement-on-the...

it's one thing to say we have a motive for the shooter, another thing to say that his actions were a rational line of causality as the OP appears to do

I don’t quite agree with amplifying the political or personal message of a murderer, as it seems like rewarding the act with publicity, encouraging more of it.

TL;DR

Shinzo Abe was associated with a religious group 'Church of Unification'... that motivated Tetsuya Yamagami to target and kill Shinzo Abe.

Yamagami told investigators that he blamed a “religious group” (i.e. the Unification Church) for inducing his mother to donate so much money that it bankrupted the family. He initially prepared to kill a church leader, but gave up after deciding it was too difficult. Yamagami then turned his focus on Abe, whom he was aware promoted the church at some level.

Abe was not supposed to be here, his speech was planned to happen in another city but instead it was decided to go to Nara the evening before. The killer couldn't have planned to kill Abe.

According to NHK TV News, shooter went to Okayama the day before where Abe made campaign speech. But as the speech was at a auditorium and Abe didn’t mingle with crowd after speech and left right away, shooter didn’t have the chance. Shooter found out online that evening about Abe’s visit to Nara.

The killer could have gone anywhere Abe was?

Not without outside help, and there is no evidence of that so this is quite speculative. I don't think it is possible for an individual to track a high ranking former official like that without being noticed so personally I see this as coincidence rather than anything else. And that may well explain the reluctance to go further in their statements by the media, they are likely just waiting for the results of the investigation.

The change in plan was supposedly announced using speaker car in Nara that same evening, and was also posted by various people on social media.

Isn’t this nearly identical to the real life events journaled by a reporter in Tokyo from the 90s? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tokyo_Vice

besides being about crime in Japan, I can't see any similarities in the article

Isn’t it a little early to be so sure exactly why this happened?

What is this Shingetsu News Agency? They don't have an English Wikipedia page and searching for them turns up only their own content.

Are they affiliated with communism? North Korea? American progressive movements? None of the above?

Do we know that this isn't two cults bickering?

In any case, the article was very light on citations for the many accusations thrown.

The main source seems to be "Kishi and Corruption: An Anatomy of the 1955 System", Samuels 2001: https://www.gwern.net/docs/japanese/2001-12-samuels-kishiand... "Kuromaku and the Underworld" section.

(Aside from the lack of proper citation, tracking down a copy proved fairly challenging, so I have to wonder if OP has actually read it.)

Site is getting hugged.

https://archive.ph/2S6PD

oh man. Nobusuke Kishi's wikipedia page is a must read: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobusuke_Kishi

Does the Unification Church have more influence than Soka Gakkai in Japanese politics?

Officially and publicly, no.

Behind the scenes - who knows (not meant to be suggestive).

That’s some top level conspiracy theory.

First, Who shoots someone just because of “connections”? Why not go after the church itself?

Further; this person got two shots off over a 4-5 second period. Just walked up to one of the most powerful politicians in Japan. I personally feel there’s something more to this — gross negligence or a conspiracy idk.

The communist opposition was actively calling for his overthrow by any means and calling him hitler (reminds me of the USA frankly). China has been celebrating his death.

Even if we assume this person believed this (highly speculative), then it was likely amplified by Chinese propaganda. China, USA, Russia, etc is known to support opposition parties and amplify conspiracy theories to support their aims.

> Why not go after the church itself?

Allegedly, the shooter's original target was an official of the church.

> I personally feel there’s something more to this — gross negligence or a conspiracy idk.

This is an official who has been out of power for a while now, and is known to be in declining health, at a local event, in a country where political violence has been low in recent years, and a country with exceptionally low crime rates. You could totally imagine security being lax and complacent given the circumstances.

> China has been celebrating his death.

You mean some people on Weibo? Lol.

It's also not surprising that some people would view him unfavorably when he denied Japanese war crimes in the past.

Articles like this are why I come to HN.

"Why the Japanese media has refused to identify the “religious group” that formed the motive for the killing must remain as speculation at this juncture, though it reflects very poorly on Japan’s status as a democratic nation."

Because they aren't stupid. When you name names and provide ample details you have given the killer things that encourage others - infamy, a platform to spread their message, etc.

In the US, we know that providing these details, such as the killer's name, and even the media's hyper focus on the event contribute to copy cats.

Why don't we create a law to prevent the media from naming names of mass killers or assassins and giving them a platform? After all, we know that this will save lives.

Edit: why disagree without reply? No right is absolute. There are already restrictions on speech, and that same reasoning is what allows gun control.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5296697/

My guess as to why you're not getting replies because the content of your comment is highly polarizing, contains assertions as absolutes rather than points of debate, and would likely result in camp vs. camp which will play out ad infinitum.

I can see that the topic is generally polarizing and that my first sentence is assuming and could be better. I do ask a question of why we don't have a law (or really just have people sue over the coverage contributing to the act). The part about knowing that sensationalized and detailed reports contributes is a pretty solid fact (theory, analysis, and anecdotal admissions from copycats).

>After all, we know that this will save lives.

There are lots of things that we know will save lives. Banning driving of all non-emergency vehicles. Banning vices and handing out 50 year prison sentences for any violation. Banning skydiving. Banning soda. We can make a very long list of things we can do to save lives. But there is a price to pay, and that price isn't worth it.

Banning free speech and the free flow of information is not a price worth paying.

Do we in fact know that if a few big news orgs dont mention the shooters names that it will motivate them to not do it? I doubt you could ever control such a thing even if you tried (Wikipedia will have to have so it's just one more step to google it).

Plus the shooters often care about change via harming their targets (creating fear in a particular group is what makes something a hate crime or terroism) which happens regardless if their actual name is published.

There's evidence in the linked study as well as in anecdotal admissions by some perpetrators (eg Columbine murders expected mass coverage and hoped that it would inspire others). Is there any evidence to refute this?

I agree that there are many things that we could do, and that there are costs associated with them.

"Banning free speech and the free flow of information is not a price worth paying."

I generally agree with this, but what harm is done by banning the media from using the name of a criminal likely to be notorious (mass murder, assassination, etc)?

Well, for starters, it would mean that members of the public who had interacted with the murderer, and had important information about their motives, means of obtaining weapons, accomplices, etc. would not realize that they had important information, and therefore would not make this information available to investigators.

Next, it would mean that powerful interests who had responsibility for the crime, by instigation or negligence, might be able to avoid accountability for their actions/omissions, since people would not be able to connect them to the murderer.

Then there's the inability of the public to see what aspects of current culture might have lead to the crime, or what deficiencies in mental health care contributed, etc.

Democracy is based on the belief that ordinary people can be trusted to know the truth, and use it in governing themselves. Perhaps you don't believe that, and are just against democracy?

"There are already restrictions on speech..."

There are particular categories of speech that aren't considered to be "protected speech". And those categories can't be expanded just because some politicians and judges think it's a good idea.

"that same reasoning is what allows gun control."

A lot of what we consider "gun control" is under active constitutional debate.

Why go to all this trouble? I agree with the general idea that we shouldn't glorify mass shooters. But all we have to do is stop clicking and start to develop a cultural idea that it's wrong to report is a way that makes killers (in)famous. Mainstream outlets will stop doing it and the fringe is not very important.

"And those categories can't be expanded just because some politicians and judges think it's a good idea."

Why not? Isn't that how the current ones came to be?

"But all we have to do is stop clicking and start to develop a cultural idea that it's wrong to report is a way that makes killers (in)famous."

That would be great, but what would that look like? I don't see a mechanism for incentizing them via culture. The only thing I can see is if people start sueing the media like they have gun makers for improper marketing.

"A lot of what we consider "gun control" is under active constitutional debate."

Is it really a lot? It seems the majority of gun control regulations still stand under the new one prong standard.

"Why not? Isn't that how the current ones came to be?"

There's an interesting history of rights prior to the Constitution. But now that we have a constitution, there's a defined process for amending it.

Of course, there is still room for interpretation. But if you allow politicians and judges to wildly change the constitution on a whim, you might as well not have one.

What you are suggesting qualifies as such a wild change to the notion of a free press, and should not be permitted without an amendment. And if such an amendment were proposed, I think it would get very little support.

Throwing out a possible issue with this idea: it lets political parties assassinate rival politicians without losing popularity (in the case where the link isn't strong enough for a conviction but IS strong enough to say the killing was done by that party).

Maybe. But if you have a lone individual assassinating someone, then you've given them a platform to spread their message. It seems this was a case of an individual. If there was any evidence that this was organized by a party, then it could be appropriate to name the party but still withold the individual's name to prevent notoriety.

Pen the statue for us, what would one look like that would stop this type of release of names?

If you read the study, there is a link to the FBI guidelines. Essentially, don't name the shooter. It would also be beneficial not to linger on one negative event for a week or more, but that's not as easy to limit. Ideally we would want journalists and networks to practice responsibility and leave out the name voluntarily, but it seems the drive for profit makes it necessary to step in with a legal solution.

https://www.dontnamethem.org/

I agree that the media should not glamorize these bad actors.

> Why don't we create a law

I was asking which statue would prevent this. How would that statue read? What would be "easy to limit?"

Especially on a global scale. No law in the US or other non-Japanese country regarding the press is going to have bearing on Japanese laws regarding Japan's media outlets.

Why the Japanese media has refused to identify the ‘religious group’ that formed the motive for the killing must remain as speculation at this juncture, though it reflects very poorly on Japan’s status as a democratic nation.

It is quite striking in the UK and US how mainstream media will be remarkably coy about identifying the cultural background of some criminals while straight off the bat into condemnatory opinion pieces with others who will resonate more as bogeymen with their readers.

"Eschew flamebait. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

It's directly relevant to the point (by a Western journalist) about Japan's "status as a democratic nation" which can presumably be turned right back on us.

That’s because the ethnicity of a criminal is usually not a relevant detail. It is not similar to the Japanese media hiding the motive of the assassination.

> That’s because the ethnicity of a criminal is usually not a relevant detail.

That’s a big assumption rooted in a moral framework rather than in objective science.

In a news report about an individual crime?

> That’s because the ethnicity of a criminal is usually not a relevant detail.

Come on, don't be coy. There are many things which aren't relevant like where the criminal is from or how old he is.

The reason they hide the ethnicity is because it helps racists to profile.

The problem is that they go too far the other way, like labeling Kyle Rittenhouse, not just white, but a white supremacist without any evidence.

Age and location are necessary to avoid confusion based on name, and are much more effective at doing so than race which has the added problem of fueling racism.

Nobusuke Kishi was a class A war criminal hmmm

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobusuke_Kishi

> After World War II, Kishi was imprisoned for three years as a suspected Class A war criminal. However, the U.S. government did not charge, try, or convict him, and eventually released him as they considered Kishi to be the best man to lead a post-war Japan in a pro-American direction.

Do not quite get the last line. All democratic countries have church played a part and individual tried to … let us say Catholic Church and scandals of … no politicians involved totally ?

The downplay is odd. But that might be cautious. We will see.

Democracy … not see what reflect ….

I don't completely buy the "religious group" reason given by the assassin.

It might just be a convenient cover story for any "State Actors" behind the assassination. Shinzo Abe had been a real thorn in the side of China and North Korea by pushing a hard-line approach towards them. He had tremendous worldwide political/economic clout and was instrumental in establishing the "Pacific Quad" as a real challenge to China and North Korea. Even after stepping down he had been active in drumming up support for his assertive stance against them which obviously wasn't to their liking.

It will be interesting to see what the investigators uncover over time.

Abe was hardly the most anti-China or anti-North Korea MP, and he was no longer prime minister for years anyway.

Not only would China or North Korea not get anything out of assassinating him, if they were discovered to have done so this would make Japan even more anti-China and anti-North Korea.

So this theory doesn't really seem that likely.

How would China or North Korea convince a Japanese soldier to openly kill his leader and face death penalty? There is very little social exchange between these countries, extremely few foreigners speaks Japanese, I just don't see how they could indoctrinate him to such a degree that he would give up his own life for that cause.

Extremely few people give up their life for a cause even when they grew up in that society, so I really don't think that this is plausible at all.

I agree with your view. The fact that the killer went through the stress of making homemade guns, which likely involved lots of hiccups, shows he had a very deep grudge for his target, and I see being (allegedly, can't confirm yet) raised in a religious cult that bankrupted your mum as an ideal catalyst for such a grudge.

And if recent years have taught me a lesson, it's that real life is often stranger than friction. What you think can only be achieved by state-level, mafia-like collaboration ends up being the work of random individuals (e.g., that Bitfinex hack where two funny characters were caught with $4.5bn of stolen bitcoin).

This is Spycraft 101;

Lots of Japanese have been abducted by North Korea to train their spies, build cover stories to live as Japanese (i.e. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleeper_agent) across generations etc. Since NK is a proxy for China, one can expect a flow through. See - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Korean_abductions_of_Jap...

In popular Movie/TV parlance (eg. Russian spies in the USA) these Sleeper Agents are called "The Illegals".

Well, this is my fear of TikTok. We've seen how Facebook and Twitter (and certsin news media) polarized/brainwashed Americans in convincing Obama is Muslim and not born in the US through crude algorithms to increase clicks.

Imagine TikTok, who isn't just driven by ad revenue but the need to keep the Chinese government happy.

I think birtherism spread mostly in places other than Facebook and Twitter. Its heyday was before those groups were on social media. Facebook's audience in 2010 was much younger than its audience in 2016, and Twitter adoption at that point was pretty minor.

Anyone who knows even a little history will realize that the aftermath of an assassination of a public figure results in an immediate increase in the popularity of the affiliated political party (the 'martyr effect'). The claims that the assassination of JFK in the United States in 1963 changed official US government policy are nonsense, incidentally - JFK was an ardent Cold Warrior who would have followed the same policy Johnson did, if faced with the imminent collapse of the South Vietnamese government. If anything the assassination strengthened the Democratic Party's political position at the time, and the same kind of effect seems to be taking place in Japan, with Abe's party expected to win a major victory.

The story of an individual with personal grievances (possibly acting alone, possibly not) related to a parent who went bankrupt by donating all their money to a religious organization affilated with the victim makes much more sense in terms of a plausible motivation. The other part of the puzzle is why security for such a well-known public figure was so poor, but Japan's history of low gun violence might explain that.

> claims that the assassination of JFK in the United States in 1963 changed official US government policy are nonsense

Seriously? The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 was passed entirely on JFK's death. I'd say that's…pretty major.

If there was state level involvement couldn't they have smuggled a proper gun instead of having him make an abomination that could very well have completely failed (and missed in the first shot)? And why go after an ex soldier in that case? It doesn't seem to check out at all.

State sponsored assassinations are almost always immediately identifiable which means it's not going to work in their favour. Abe also retired at the end of 2020 and the amount of influence he can still exert is to prop up his own intra-party faction, not direct international policy. Sino-Japanese trade was also consistently growing in latter half of his term.

Real life isn't a fiction or video game. This type of whacky beer talk is neither interesting or amusing. Please familiarize yourself with some basic context of the subject before making grotesque insinuations about it.

>State sponsored assassinations are almost always immediately identifiable

This is clueless and childish naivete; do you believe everything you see and hear? In Geopolitics one should never ever accept the superficial and face-value explanation but should always try to look behind the curtain.

There is a reason China is celebrating his assassination. Abe was single-handedly responsible for establishing, driving and bankrolling the Quad (Quadrilateral Security Dialogue between USA, Japan, India and Australia) which is a direct and serious threat to China. And no he didn't disappear after retirement as you seem to think; men of his stature and influence always have the ear of policy makers until the end.

We will see what the investigators uncover but nobody should buy assassin confessed simplistic explanations until we have more information. It is but one plausible explanation among a set which needs to be "proven". Until then we need to explore all possibilities.

>There is a reason China is celebrating his assassination

By edgy Internet users. The state had already sent condolences through official diplomatic channels. Do you believe trending Twitter hashtags as official statements from entire countries as well?

>Abe was single-handedly responsible for establishing, driving and bankrolling the Quad (Quadrilateral Security Dialogue between USA, Japan, India and Australia) which is a direct and serious threat to China.

You think one person did it single-handedly? Let me repeat your own question: do you believe everything you see and hear? Are you aware there is a major player in Asia-Pacific that isn't geographically located there?

>And no he didn't disappear after retirement as you seem to think; men of his stature and influence always have the ear of policy makers until the end.

Where did I say he disappeared? Read my comments again. He's not the first senior party member in the LDP. Previous ones don't directly meddle with current government policy or it would be a constitutional crisis.

The only ones who need to explore all possibilities are the investigators indeed, not some random person boasting flimsy conspiracy theories on an Internet forum that usually doesn't even have anything to do with this sort of topic anyways. There's a special sort of irony in the mentions of "clueless and childish naïveté", and you seem to lack the awareness for that.

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