In Japan, Shinzo Abe suspect’s grudge against Unification Church is a familiar one

The day before Shinzo Abe was assassinated, Tetsuya Yamagami sent a letter saying that the Unification Church had ruined his life, “destroying my family and driving it into bankruptcy.”

Yamagami’s mother had been a member of the church for more than two decades, making prodigious donations over her family’s objections. “It’s no exaggeration to say that my experience with it during that time continues to distort my whole life,” he wrote to a blogger who covered the church. Japanese police have confirmed that he sent the letter.

The next day, Abe was dead, shot at close range with an improvised gun while campaigning in the city of Nara, Japan.

Police have charged Yamagami with murder, saying he was angry at a “certain group” and decided to target Abe, the former prime minister of Japan. Authorities haven’t named the group, but a Unification Church spokesperson said that Yamagami was most likely referring to them.

The July 8 shooting has thrust the church’s legal troubles back into the national dialogue, in particular its battles with families who said they had been impoverished by large donations. Those payments were among billions of dollars in revenue from Japan that helped finance much of the church’s global political and business ambitions.

In one judgment from 2016, a Tokyo civil court awarded more than $270,000 in damages to the former husband of a church member, after she donated his inheritance, salary and retirement funds to the group to “save” him and his ancestors from damnation.

In another civil case from 2020, a judge ordered the church and other defendants to pay damages to a woman after members had convinced her that her child’s cancer was caused by familial sins. On their advice, she spent tens of thousands of dollars on church goods and services.

Last week, church officials said they had struck an agreement in 2009 with the family of Yamagami’s mother to repay 50 million yen (about $360,000) in donations she had made. Yamagami’s uncle said she had given at least 100 million yen.

In the letter he sent before the shooting, Yamagami said he had spent years dreaming of revenge, but had become convinced that attacking the church would accomplish nothing.

Abe is “not my enemy,” Yamagami wrote, “he’s nothing more than one of the Unification Church’s most powerful sympathisers.”