The Assassination and Legacy of Shinzo Abe - Transcript

Assasination and legacy of Shinzo Abe

Opening Jingle [00:00:02]

This is the Nordic Asia podcast.

Kenneth Bo Nielsen [00:00:10]

Welcome to the Nordic Asia Podcast, a collaboration sharing expertise on Asia across the Nordic region. My name is Kenneth Bo Nielsen, a social anthropologist based in Oslo and one of the leaders of the Norwegian Network for Asian Studies. In this episode, we examine the fallout from Prime Minister Abe's assassination, on his legacy and on Japan. Abe’s brutal assassination on the 8th of July of this year has shocked Japan and has produced large and also unexpected consequences for the nation's politics. Rather than cement Abe's legacy as an outstanding statesman who was martyred, the circumstances surrounding his murder and subsequent plans for a state funeral have raised large challenges and questions for the current Prime Minister, Kishida, the LDP and also the role of religion in politics. It also raises questions about how much of Abe's political legacy will actually survive his assassination. To discuss these questions, we're joined by a long-term collaborator, Paul Midford, professor of political science at Meiji Gakuin University in Yokohama, who previously headed the Japan program at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim, Norway. Welcome, Paul, and thanks for joining us once more for a discussion of contemporary Japanese politics.

Paul Midford [00:01:36]

My pleasure. It's great to join you again, Kenneth.

Kenneth Bo Nielsen [00:01:39]

Now, as we know, Japan is a country that's renowned for its low violent crime and also low ownership of guns. And yet, Japan's longest serving prime minister, Shinzo Abe, was brutally assassinated in July this year. How and why did this happen?

Paul Midford [00:01:58]

Well, former Prime Minister Abe was gunned down while giving a stump speech for an upper House candidate from his own party in front of a train station in the old capital of Nara, which is just east of Osaka on Friday, July 8th. Now, the suspected assassin, whose name is Yamagami Tetsuya, was arrested immediately after he had twice fired a homemade shotgun at Abe. Now, the suspect apparently got around Japan's gun control laws, which are among some of the strictest in the world by using the knowledge he had obtained while serving as a member of Japan's self-defense Forces, the armed forces years ago, and then more recently by watching how-to videos about gun making on YouTube.

Kenneth Bo Nielsen [00:02:42]

But what do we know about the assassins motivation to take Abe’s life?

Paul Midford [00:02:46]

The suspect immediately confessed to the police and claimed that he did not target Abe for his political views, but rather because he perceived that Abe had strong connections with what's known as the Family Federation for World Peace and Unification, which is a church or what is more widely known as the Unification Church. They changed their name a couple of years ago, and in the U.S. and some other countries, this church is sometimes referred to as the Moonie Church after its founder, the Reverend Sun Myung Moon, who established this church in South Korea in 1954. Now, Yamagami, the suspect, told police that he held a grudge against the Unification Church for bankrupting his family. His mother joined the church following his father's death and was persuaded to donate essentially his family's entire financial assets to the church, leaving the family destitute. And as a result, Yamagami, who had been a star student in high school, lost the opportunity to go to university because his family simply couldn't afford it.

Kenneth Bo Nielsen [00:03:52]

Yes, as you mentioned, the full name is the Family Federation for World Peace and Unification, now known as the Unification Church. Growing up in the late seventies and 1990s, this is a church, a society that I remember from the news media surrounded by various controversies in those days also. As you mentioned, its history goes back to the 1950s. But historically speaking, what is the role of the Unification Church in Japan and also maybe especially Abe’s association with it?

Paul Midford

Well after developing in South Korea, this church, which I'll just call the Unification Church for short, it's how it's often referred to even today in Japan, arrived in Japan in the 1960s, and the Reverend Moon was introduced to former Prime Minister Kishi Nobusuke. Kishi, who's a pivotal figure in post-war Japanese history is Abe's grandfather, and Kishi and the Reverend Moon formed a very close alliance of sorts based on their shared, strong, shared anti-communism. Now, Kishi facilitated the Unification Churches establishment in Japan and supported the victory over communism political organization that moon established in Japan. The Unification Church subsequently supplied church members as basically free campaign labor for Kishi and other LDP politicians, with some of these laborers reportedly working up to 17 hours a day. And Abe's father, in turn, Abe Shintaro, another prominent LDP politician who served as foreign minister and had been tapped as a future prime minister before he died of cancer in 1991, he inherited Kishi’s Unification Church ties, and then when he passed on, his son Abe Shinzo inherited these ties. So in addition to Kishi and two generations of politicians named Abe, their faction in the LDP and some other factions in the LDP benefited from their ties with the Unification Church, which not only provided them with campaign workers free of charge, but also the church would tell church adherence how to vote and try to influence family and friends about how to vote. So for the church, the relationship with Japan was also, I think it's important to note, really profitable as they aggressively sought adherence and financial contributions. So the church members were known to target the families of people who had recently passed away, and they would visit them and they tell them that their loved ones had contacted them from beyond the grave and asked them to make large contribution on their behalf or to buy a vase or some other object at a really extremely high prices. Now, the church traded on the reputation of Abe and other well-known major politicians then, to convince bereaved families that they were a respectable organization. Now, this strategy has come to be known as spiritual sales, and it was so successful that it's been reported that during the 1970s and 1980s, around 70% of the Unification Church's global revenues came just from Japan. And I would add that there's an active lawyers association called the Association Against Spiritual Sales that has been trying to, in some cases, claw back some of the money that people felt pressured to donate to the church.

Kenneth Bo Nielsen [00:07:22]

So as I mentioned in the opening vignette, I mean, all these issues that are surrounding Abe’s assassination, they've had consequences also for the current government led by Kishida. As we are having this conversation, Paul, he's been Prime Minister for roughly a year, maybe a year and a couple of weeks, not a long time in office. If we are to get slightly more specific, how is Abe’s association with the Unification Church affecting the Kishida administration and also the ruling LDP?

Paul Midford

In short, it's having a big and very negative impact. It's really a terrible thing to contemplate about such a brutal act of violence, but I really cannot think of any other major political assassination in Japan or really any other country that, from the perspective of the perpetrators motivations, has been so overwhelmingly successful. Yamagami he intended to target the Unification Church and those politicians who lended legitimacy to that church, and his act proved spectacularly successful in doing exactly that. Ever since the assassination, the Japanese media has been filled with stories about Abe, his father, and his grandfather's connection to this church. The deep connections between Abe's faction within the LDP and this church, and the connections of other LDP politicians, and even even actually some opposition politicians were found to have connections with this church. Now, although he does not personally appear to have any ties with the Unification Church himself, Prime Minister Kishida and the LDP have suffered great political damage from the scandal and his cabinet support ratings started to fall when the media revealed basically around late July started to reveal that a large portion of his cabinet consisted of politicians who had ties to this church. So Kishida responded by launching a new cabinet in the hope of raising its support rate. But then the media discovered that many of the members of his new cabinet also had ties. So consequently his cabinet support rate fell dramatically. So in a Mainichi poll, for example, in August it fell 16% and became net negative for the first time. This is especially striking when you consider that normally a prime minister in Japan they will reshuffle their cabinet as a way to raise their support rate. But in this case, it not only did failed to rise, it fell significantly. What's even more striking is of the same poll found that 68% of respondents thought that new lineup of ministers, they evaluated this new lineup of ministers really negatively and a whopping 87% of all respondents said the LDP's ties to the Unification Church were problematic, including 64% who called this extremely problematic. Also, 86% of respondents said politicians should sever all ties with this church. So the public's verdict on the LDP and its ties to this church, the Unification Church, have been extremely negative. Now, Kishida responded to public anger by ordering an internal LDP investigation of members ties to the church. But public anger, rather than kind of being ameliorated, was further stoked when the LDP did not release all the names of members with ties, just those with the what they deemed to be the most significant or strongest ties. They also did not report on the late Prime Minister Abe's ties. Now, Kishida then responded by ordering that henceforth all LDP politicians must sever their ties with the Unification Church. He also had the government set up a hotline for victims to receive advice about their rights and Consumer Affairs Minister Kono Taro, who was formerly Kishida’s rival, set up an advisory council as consumer affairs minister to consider what further steps could be taken against this church. However, none of these steps have reversed the slide in Kishida public support, which has continued and has been nearing the so-called danger line of 30% below which it becomes hard for a Japanese Prime Minister to remain in office much longer. I'll just add one other thing that happened just today. Kishida decided and had his Minister of Cultural Affairs decide to launch an investigation of this church. And that is a step towards possibly stripping its religious corporation status. So in other words, they would lose its status as a religion in Japan. This would be a major step and be only the third time in the post-war era that that's happened. One of the other times being when the Shinrikyo cult set off sarin gas attacks in downtown Tokyo. Now, this will probably take a while, but it does appear that this will happen. And this, again, just illustrates how successful Yamagami has been in targeting this church.

Kenneth Bo Nielsen [00:12:22]

And these are very dramatic developments. And those figures you mentioned from the various opinion polls are also, in many respects striking and in a sense it gets worse, no? If we look at the state funeral, for example, this was held in late September, a very large affair. By most counts, more than 4000 guests attending Abe’s state funeral, including the U.S. vice president, Camilla Harris, the British foreign secretary James Cleverly, long list of political VIPs and only as far as I know, the second state funeral for a former prime minister since the war. But according to many of the opinion polls I've seen, it seemed as if the majority of the Japanese population were, in fact, against this state funeral for Abe. So on the one hand, a very large event, but evidently also, on the other hand, a very controversial event, right?

Paul Midford

Yes, that's right. By the way, I think Prime Minister Modi was one of the heads of state who also attended. But, yes, Abe's funeral ended up being very controversial with many Japanese opposed. Now, to be sure, nobody has publicly expressed any sympathy for the assassin’s act, his brutal act. But Yamagami has nonetheless ended up being, for many in Japan, seemingly a more sympathetic figure than the former prime minister. So his story of a life ruined by the Unification Church has resonated deeply with the public. Really behind this intense spotlight on the Unification Church and the LDP's ties with that church. And in fact, the media has noted that some Japanese have been sending this assassin care packages out of sympathy. And there is even a phenomenon of an online group of kind of fans who've been dubbed the so-called Yamagami Girls for praising Yamagami’s looks and his studiousness. On the other hand, Abe was a very polarizing figure who had high negative ratings, in part because of some of the incendiary things he said. So, for example, he suggested just before the delayed and domestically unpopular Olympics were held summer of last year, that people who opposed holding the Olympics were, quote, anti-Japanese unquote. On the right, however, Abe was and is much beloved, and that's a major reason why Kishida felt compelled to call for a state funeral because the right wing of his party, including the Abe faction, which is the largest faction, very much wanted this. On the other hand, on the left he is intensely disliked for the things he said and did. And frankly, there are very few people in the middle with moderate or balanced views of Abe. Many citizens felt that, you know, they were being forced to mourn and subsidize the funeral of a leader with whom they had strong disagreement and disapproval. Another reason why Abe’s funeral was opposed by in many polls around 60% of Japanese, is because many objected to spending taxpayer money for a funeral after years of government and personal austerity. Even the uncontroversial accession ceremony for the new emperor in 2019 was scaled back a lot for this reason. And COVID is a kind of added to this atmosphere that with some commentators saying this money should have been spent on measures to combat COVID rather than on a state funeral. A final reason is that Japan has no law for state funerals. You mentioned that there had only been one other funeral for a prime minister in the post-war era. That was for former Prime Minister Yoshida Shigeru, who is truly a giant in kind of establishing the postwar order in Japan during the occupation. But yeah, other than that, there's never been another state funeral and there is no law or legal framework to really govern this. So it was kind of acting sort of on the fly and doing that.

Kenneth Bo Nielsen [00:16:12]

We spent much time discussing the Unification Church and the church's ties to politician as perhaps sort of one of the more spectacular fallouts arising from Abe’s assassination and these current debates about what should be the fate and the status of this Unification Church in the future. Are there other fallouts that have resulted from Abe’s assassination that we also need to be mindful of?

Paul Midford [00:16:38]

Well, one obvious result is that police protection for politicians has been increased and is being rethought. This was obviously a big failure for the Japanese police, in fact, one, although it was also kind of a one-off and that one police officer was behind Abe, looked away for a few seconds, and that gave him his chance. On the other hand, there really appears to be no sign that Japanese politicians are going to give up on their campaign style of giving speeches out in the open on the street, usually on top of vans or buses and usually in front of large train stations, which was exactly what Abe was doing when he was gunned down. Now a bigger fallout from Abe's assassination is that it has left the conservative wing of the LDP and especially the Abe faction that he led essentially leaderless. In fact, Abe is faction, which again, was the largest, has not been able to find or agree on a single successor. And hence the faction has decided for now to have a collective leadership of several leaders because they can't decide who among them should take over. That development really does not bode well for the future of this faction, which may well break up because of this leadership vacuum, or rather a leadership contest that may emerge between a couple of rivals. Another point is that this faction, as the largest faction, is probably too large to maintain cohesion when you have such a large faction. Younger members tend to become dissatisfied because they don't advance up the ranks very quickly. And it's kind of becomes too big and unwieldy. So many observers think it's in danger of breaking up. Now because the Abe faction and the right wing of the LDP more generally is essentially leaderless as of now, this provides Prime Minister Kishida potentially with significantly more room for political maneuver.

Kenneth Bo Nielsen [00:18:30]

But it says something about Abe's standing, no? That when he is removed from the political equation, the faction that was his seems to be almost paralyzed, at least for the time being. If we look ahead and you may well say that it's too early to begin discussing these things, but if I could push you to speculate a little bit. Abe's standing as Japan's longest serving prime minister in the post-war era, parliamentarian for, I think, close to three decades, by all accounts, towering presence in Japanese politics, whether you support him or not. How much of Abe’s political legacy will survive his assassination and all of the controversy that has surrounded it both in these several months that have transpired since it happened?

Paul Midford

Well, at least in the short run, certain policies, particularly in terms of security and defence, we can see the influence of the late Prime Minister Abe and his potential legacy. Now Prime Minister Kishida and his faction in the LDP, unlike Abe, are known for being on the kind of liberal or left side of the conservative LDP. That said, since becoming Prime minister, Kishida has followed many of Abe's hardline policies on security, including a plan to greatly increase Japan's defense spending over the next two years, possibly up to 2% of GDP, which would essentially double defence spending. However, Kishida has been a bit vague about that, whether he would go that far. But defence spending is clearly going up a lot this year and frankly actually more than it did during any single year under Abe. Now defence spending rose every year that Abe was prime minister, but usually by very small increments. But it definitely is going to be going up by significantly more than that this year and will clearly breach the de facto 1% of GDP devoted to defence spending, which has been a kind of de facto framework for defence spending since the 1970s. Kishida also appears to support the calls by Conservatives for Japan to acquire surface to surface missiles that can attack military bases and other countries, most notably in North Korea and China. And the Kishida administration has also been discussing the possibility of building new nuclear power plants in terms of domestic energy policy in the 2030. So in the next decade from now. That's something that even the personally pro-nuclear Abe did not do. Now, partly this is because we're in a changing environment. The war in Ukraine has greatly increased energy prices and there's been a bit of an energy crunch in Japan. So that's part of the reason why conservatives and supporters of nuclear power think this might be a good time to do this. On the other hand, despite promises to do so, Kishida has not been promoting revision of Japan's constitution, especially its war, renouncing Article nine, which was Abe's pet project. Some say his pet ideological project than a security project. And now that Kishida support ratings are so low, even if he wanted to, he probably lacks the political capital to push constitutional reform forward, which is a very difficult process that requires two thirds of the lower and upper houses to approve an amendment to the Constitution. And then a majority of Japanese voters have to approve that in a national referendum. Also because of his reduced political capital, it might be hard for Kishida to promote some of his more controversial proposals, especially large sustained increases in defense spending that I just mentioned over several years, not only because Japan has a very tight fiscal situation with large deficit spending, but also because it's likely that other interest groups will start demanding similar increases, if defense goes up that much, consistent over several years. Now, promoting the construction of new nuclear power plants might also be difficult for Kishida to do, given his limited political capital. But in terms of Abe's overall legacy, the one thing he really did seem to cherish above all was constitutional reform. And that really looks like it's not going anywhere right now. And again, it's not even clear that Prime Minister Kishida wanted to promote that anyway. But even regardless, he simply seems to lack the political capital to do so now.

Kenneth Bo Nielsen [00:22:50]

Paul Midford. It's always a pleasure talking Japanese politics with you. Thanks so much for joining us today.

Paul Midford [00:22:56]

Likewise. My pleasure talking to you, Kenneth.

Kenneth Bo Nielsen [00:22:59]

Fingers crossed you will be back with us a couple of months from now for more updates on what's happening on that scene. My name is Kenneth Bo Nielsen, and thank you for joining the Nordic Asia podcast showcasing Nordic collaboration in studying Asia.

Closing Jingle [00:23:18]

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