Japan's former PM Shinzo Abe assasinated with homemade improvised shotgun

This is the place to post your news and reviews on anything that's firearm related (rifles, magazines, ammo, barrels, holsters, training classes, optics, etc). Please try to make the reviews as thorough as possible and include pictures, or links to pictures if possible, as well as price(s). Some syndicated content will go here as well.
User avatar
smithers599
ArizonaShooting.org Member
ArizonaShooting.org Member
Posts: 4362
Joined: June 29th, 2018, 6:58 am
Reputation: 23
Location: East side

Re: Japan's former PM Shinzo Abe assasinated with homemade improvised shotgun

#16

Post by smithers599 »

He was a defender of Taiwan, and an opponent of Communist China. I wonder if there was any ChiCom involvement.


User avatar
aroyobob
ArizonaShooting.org Member
ArizonaShooting.org Member
Posts: 179
Joined: February 15th, 2020, 6:22 am
Reputation: 0
Location: Glendale

Re: Japan's former PM Shinzo Abe assasinated with homemade improvised shotgun

#17

Post by aroyobob »

smithers599 wrote: July 9th, 2022, 5:14 pm He was a defender of Taiwan, and an opponent of Communist China. I wonder if there was any ChiCom involvement.
This is being given as the motive. I haven't seen anything identifying the religious group.

The man who fatally shot former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has told police that he initially planned to attack a leader of a religious group who he believed caused his mother to make big donations to the group, investigative sources said Saturday.
Tetsuya Yamagami, 41, has also admitted that he intended to kill Abe, believing he had ties with the group, the sources said.
https://asia.nikkei.com/Politics/Shinzo ... ious-group
User avatar
effjaybay
ArizonaShooting.org Member
ArizonaShooting.org Member
Posts: 192
Joined: May 15th, 2018, 11:18 am
Reputation: 0

Re: Japan's former PM Shinzo Abe assasinated with homemade improvised shotgun

#18

Post by effjaybay »

QuietM4 wrote: July 9th, 2022, 3:06 pm I'd like to see a lot more info on that sweet improvised shotgun. Using non-gun related, off the shelf parts, It's not difficult to imagine how it was built. Charged capacitors and a switch/trigger to activate a model rocket engine igniters or just to heat up a piece of wire enough to ignite the powder charge, powder charge from disassembled fireworks, steel tubing and cap from a hardware store, ball bearings or small metal objects for the shot, all packed down and sealed with a wax cap. Attach it all to a few pieces of 2x4. All easily purchased OTC in Japan.
User avatar
Suck My Glock
ArizonaShooting.org Member
ArizonaShooting.org Member
Posts: 8816
Joined: May 25th, 2018, 3:01 pm
Reputation: 8
Location: Peoria

Re: Japan's former PM Shinzo Abe assasinated with homemade improvised shotgun

#19

Post by Suck My Glock »

UPDATE: The curiously odd connection between the Unification Church (the Moonies) and the assassination of Shinzo Abe.

https://12ft.io/proxy?q=https%3A%2F%2Fw ... F675114%2F

At a Nara police station, the suspect—a 41-year-old named Tetsuya Yamagami—admitted to the shooting barely 30 minutes after pulling the trigger. He then offered a motive that sounded too outlandish to be true: He saw Abe as an ally of the Unification Church, a group better known as the Moonies—the cult founded in the 1950s by the Korean evangelist Reverend Sun Myung Moon. Yamagami said his life had been ruined when his mother gave the church all of the family’s money, leaving him and his siblings so poor that they often didn’t have enough to eat. His brother had committed suicide, and he himself had tried to.

“My prime target was the Unification Church’s top official, Hak Ja Han, not Abe,” he told the police, according to an account published in January in a newspaper called The Asahi Shimbun. He could not get to Han—Moon’s widow—so he shot Abe, who was “deeply connected” to the church, Yamagami said, just as Abe’s grandfather, also a prime minister and renowned political figure in Japan, had been.

Investigators looked into Yamagami’s wild-sounding claims and found, to their alarm, that they were true. After a quick huddle, the police appear to have decided that the Moonie connection was too sensitive to reveal, at least for the moment. It might even affect the outcome of the elections for the Upper House of the Diet, set to take place on July 10. At a press conference on the night of the assassination, a police official would say only that Yamagami had carried out the attack because he “harbored a grudge against a specific group and he assumed that Abe was linked to it.” When reporters clamored for details, the official said nothing.

After the election, the Unification Church confirmed press reports that Yamagami’s mother was a member, and the story quickly took off. The Moonies, it emerged, maintained a volunteer army of campaign workers who had long been a secret weapon not just for Abe but for many other politicians in his conservative Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), which remains in power under Prime Minister Fumio Kishida. Later that month, the Japanese tabloid Nikkan Gendai published a list of 111 members of parliament who had connections to the church. In early September 2022, the LDP announced that almost half of its 379 Diet members had admitted to some kind of contact with the Unification Church, whether that meant accepting campaign assistance or paying membership fees or attending church events. According to a survey by The Asahi Shimbun, 290 members of prefectural assemblies, as well as seven prefectural governors, also said they had church ties. The rising numbers exposed a scandal hiding in plain sight: A right-wing Korean cult had a near-umbilical connection to the political party that had governed Japan for most of the past 70 years.

The Japanese were outraged not just by the appearance of influence-peddling but by a galling hypocrisy. Abe was a fervent nationalist, eager to rebuild Japan’s global standing and proudly unapologetic for its imperial past. Now he and his party had been caught in a secretive electoral alliance with a cult that—it soon emerged—had been accused of preying on Japanese war guilt to squeeze billions of dollars from credulous followers.

As information about Yamagami’s personal history and the LDP’s role became more widely known, a strange inversion took place: People began expressing sympathy for the alleged assassin and anger at the victim. A Japanese weekly devoted a cover story to the swooning fans known as “Yamagami Girls” and other supporters. Well-wishers began sending Yamagami gifts. Thousands of people protested the decision to grant Abe a state funeral, and a hastily made feature film that portrayed Yamagami as a tragic hero was shown all over the country. The LDP’s poll numbers, already falling, continued to drop, and a cabinet minister was forced to resign after he failed to adequately explain his ties to the church.
Post Reply