Tetsuya Yamagami is accused of fatally shooting the former prime minister as the powerful conservative leader gave a campaign speech in July.
TOKYO — The brazen assassination of former Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe with a handmade gun shocked a nation unused to high-profile political violence.
Experts say the case has also illuminated the plight of thousands of other children of church adherents who have faced abuse and neglect. Yamagami, who is being detained for mental evaluation until late November, has previously expressed on social media a hatred for the Unification Church, which was founded in South Korea in 1954 and has, since the 1980s, faced accusations of devious recruitment practices and brainwashing of adherents into making huge donations.
Yamagami's uncle, in media interviews, said Yamagami's mother donated 60 million yen within months of joining the church. When her father died in the late 1990s, she sold company property worth 40 million yen , bankrupting the family in 2002. The uncle said he had to stop giving money for food and school to the Yamagami children because the mother gave it to the church, not her children.
In December 2019, he tweeted that his grandfather blamed Yamagami's mother for the family's troubles and even tried to kill her."What's most hopeless is that my grandfather was right. But I wanted to believe my mother." Yamagami's case also has shed light on the children of Unification Church adherents. Many are neglected, experts say, and there's been little help because government and school officials tend to resist interference on religious freedom grounds.
Yamagami reportedly told police he had planned to kill the church founder's wife, Hak Ja Han Moon, who has led the church since Moon's 2012 death, but switched targets because it was unlikely she'd visit Japan during the pandemic.
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