A Japanese assassination that hints at an abyss of despair

Abe’s killing was an absurd crime though the murderer denied a political motive while proudly confessing it

The craziest of days began with an unusual flock of helicopters flying over the heads of the inhabitants of the Kansai region. Then the news that seemed almost a rumor, Shinzo Abe, the former Japanese prime minister, was shot in the streets near Nara city.

It took some time for the news to actually be verified, and it’s a good bet that no Japanese believed their ears at that moment.

Not here in Japan, not an attack, never a firearm. And it doesn’t matter if that weapon was put together almost like a toy by the 41-year-old assailant, Tetsuya Yamagami, because the killer hit his target twice, from very close range and left him with no hope. The assistance of doctors in the nearby Nara hospital was of little use.

One wonders what kind of Japan this will be after Abe’s assassination. Where a stone’s throw from Yamato-Saidaiji station, with little traffic, a secondary station of the old and ancient city of Nara, a monument of national politics was brutally gunned down while addressing a small crowd of 30 people.

Yes, because the Land of the Rising Sun is a country that can boast a tiny street crime record that it needs experts with a microscope to make calculations. It is that country where rallies are organized in front of an audience that looks emotionless at a showman. The low numbers of those who go to vote prove it.

But above all, it is the country where firearms are stuff for deer hunters, a rough people of the cold northern provinces.

“In Japan, these street terrorists have a recognizable profile. They are male, between 20 and 40 years old, suffer from very low tolerance to stress, immaturity, anger and resentment towards society”

If street crimes in Japan are nothing new — they occur and unfortunately not sporadically —  this is the first in recent decades with such a peremptory political motivation, even though the culprit has denied that his motive was political. So much so, that the murderer proudly confessed to the crime.

Yet all this does not erase the evidence of an absurd crime committed by a character not unlike the many “toori but malefic passers-by,” as are those who stain themselves with apparently meaningless attacks on unarmed people, as defined here.

Well before the Nice attack in 2016, Tomohiro Kato, 26, got into a truck 14 years ago and passed over the bodies of five people, three dead and two wounded. Then he stabbed at least 12 people killing four. It would go down in history as the Akihabara massacre.

In Japan, these street terrorists have a recognizable profile. They are male, between 20 and 40 years old, suffer from very low tolerance to stress, immaturity, anger and resentment towards society. Generally isolated, they have little contact with friends or family.

If most of these episodes take place in the big cities it is no coincidence. For many, life in a megalopolis translates into the suspension of human relationships. There is no neighbor with whom you can exchange a few words. Human relationships are frozen in a cold and impersonal “etiquette.”

It is an environment indifferent to the fate of individuals. But above all, what unites many of these attackers and what makes Japanese workaholics most suspicious, is the lack of a job, which seems true in the case of Tetsuya Yamagami.

It is no coincidence that after the 2007 crisis or what everyone in Japan calls the “Lehman Shock,” there was an explosion of the hikikomori (a severe form of social withdrawal) pathology. The era of shushoku-hyougaki — the evocative expression that the Japanese use to define “the ice age of hiring” or the period of economic stagnation — had begun.

It was a troubled time for young people looking for a job. And there is logic if today among the many young people who came to pay homage at Nara at the Yamato Saidaiji station there were precisely many of that generation who found words of gratitude for the former premier Abe, specifically for the efforts made in the direction of bringing back a stagnant economy from the previous 20 years.

Slowly, Abe had succeeded. Abe’s other winning policy was having convinced women, who have always preferred the dining room to the office, to enter the job market. Today the country is suffering one of the lowest birth rates in its history and the two things are not at all unrelated.

*The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official editorial position of UCA News.

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