Shinzo Abe, Japan’s longest-serving prime minister (Sept 2006 – Sept 2007 and Dec 2012 – Sept 2020), was pronounced dead on Friday (July 8) after five and a half hours after he was assassinated while campaigning for political candidate Kei Sato in the southern city of Nara for a parliamentary election – about 300 miles (480km) from the capital city Tokyo.

The killer has been identified as Tetsuya Yamagami, who turned out to be a former member of Japan’s Maritime Self-Defense Force – Japan’s equivalent of a Navy. He reportedly had served for 3 years until 2005. Security officials at the scene tackled him to the ground, but not before he successfully pumped two lethal shots at 67-year-old Abe with a homemade shotgun.

Apparently, Tetsuya, wearing grey T-shirt and beige trousers, approached Abe from behind and shot him in the chest and neck. After the stunning assassination, police search his home and discovered several possible explosive devices. Japan NHK reported that Tetsuya, a local resident of Nara, told police he was dissatisfied with Abe and wanted to kill him.

Horrifying footage shows Mr Abe collapsed and was lying face-up on the street while clutching his blood-smeared chest as body guards security police rushed toward him. He was airlifted to hospital, but vigorous efforts to save him have been fruitless from the beginning. He lost too much blood and the damages were too severe after the shooting.

During a news conference at the Nara Medical University Hospital, doctors said Shinzo Abe had sustained deep bullet wounds to his neck – about 5cm (1inch) apart, and one of the bullets had entered and damaged his heart. Even though Abe was said to be conscious and responsive in the first few minutes after the attack, doctors said no vital signs were detected by the time the ex-PM was brought in.

Abe suffered “cardiopulmonary arrest” – the cessation of adequate heart function and respiration that results in death without reversal – even before he arrived at the hospital. He basically bled to death, despite receiving more than 100 units of blood in transfusions over four hours, according to Hidetada Fukushima, the professor in charge of emergency medicine at the Nara Medical University Hospital.

Unlike the United States, gun violence is extremely rare in Japan because handguns are banned. In 2014, there were just 6 incidents of gun deaths in the country, as compared to 33,599 in the US. Last year, there were 10 incidents of shooting – one dead and 4 wounded. There were about 310,400 guns possessed by civilians in Japan in 2019, compared to 393 million in the U.S.

Japanese must undergo a strict exam and mental health tests in order to buy a gun – mostly acquired for sport and hunting. However, the fact that gun violence is extremely rare, is also the same reason why the assassination attempt on Abe was so successful. Security checks were lacking, allowing Tetsuya Yamagami easy access to carry his mission.

The last time a former prime minister was gunned down was 90 years ago. In 1932, Prime Minister Tsuyoshi was Inukai was assasinated by 11 young Navy officers in the Prime Minister’s residence in Tokyo. It was a plot to provoke war with the U.S. as the original assassination plan had included killing film star Charlie Chaplin, who was visiting Japan as Inukai’s guest.

Shinzo Abe announced his resignation in 2020 for health reasons, revealing that he had suffered a relapse of ulcerative colitis, an inflammatory bowel disease. However, his resignation also came at a time when he was deeply unpopular and under pressure to resign. Prior, he resigned abruptly in 2007 as prime minister – after just over a year in office – citing the same disease.

During his almost eight years in office, Mr Abe pursued a policy based on three arrows – monetary easing, fiscal expansion and structural reform – popularly known as “Abenomics”. During his administration, the rate of Japan’s nominal GDP growth was averaging just 0.9%, but the ratio of government debt relative to national income stabilized for the first time in decades.

However, the structural reform was not as effective as analysts had hoped. The Abenomics policy led to a dramatic weakening of the Japanese yen – losing as much as 25% against the U.S. dollar. Even though the stock market was bullish, the impact on wages and consumer sentiment was a disaster. A Kyodo News poll showed 73% of Japanese said they had not personally noticed the effects of Abenomics.

Abe’s ambitious target of boosting nominal GDP to 600 trillion yen by 2020 never materialised and remains an empty dream to the day he was assassinated. Worse, inflation and wage growth fell short of expectations. Current Prime Minister Fumio Kishida has to distance himself from Abenomics, proposing instead a “new capitalism”  that prioritizes income redistribution.

In fact, it was just last month when Abe criticized an economic policy paper drafted by politicians in his Liberal Democratic Party as “idiotic” because it was not in line with his signature economic policy of Abenomics. But critics said Abenomics failed to deliver on pledges such as giving women in the workforce more of a voice, tackling nepotism and changing unhealthy work cultures.

Equally controversial was Abe’s plan to boost Japan’s military forces. Not only the country has boosted defense spending by 10% under his watch, in a historic move in 2014, his government reinterpreted the constitution to allow Japanese troops to fight overseas for the first time since World War 2 – triggering tensions with China as well as angering Japanese voters at home.

Abe believed that the U.S.-drafted constitution was unfairly designed to restrict Japan’s ability to exercise self-defence, or to help allies under attack. Article 9 of the Japanese Constitution, which has been nominated for the Nobel peace prize, renounces war as a means of settling international disputes and limits Japan’s military to a purely defensive posture.

The Abe administration, encouraged by Barack Obama ‘s support for Japan playing a more active role in its security alliance with the U.S., argued that Chinese aggression in the South China Sea and North Korean nuclear weapons meant the time had come to consider changing the constitution. But the Japanese public was divided and concerned about the consequences.

A Japanese women’s group had threatened to go on a “sex strike” to punish any man who supports Abe’s move. The primary reason the U.S. drafted the Japanese constitution to cripple the country’s military was to prevent another Japanese brutality from repeating again. It would take two atomic bombs to wipe out Hiroshima and Nagasaki to force Japanese to surrender in 1945.

China, on the other hand, still remembers  how the Japanese Imperial Armny marched into China’s capital city of Nanking in 1937 and brutally murdered 300,000 out of 600,000 civilians. Also known as the Nanjing Massacre or the Rape of Nanjing, the Japanese Imperial Army also committed other atrocities such as mass rape, looting, and arson.

Even two years after Abe stepped down under the pretext of health reason, he emerged as the most outspoken Japanese leader against China. Last year, the former Japanese prime minister warned Beijing that Japan and the U.S. could not stand by if China attacked Taiwan – suggesting that the Japanese will join American forces to retaliate against the Chinese.

Warning Beijing not to “provoke or bully its neighbours or pursue territorial expansion”, Shinzo Abe said in Dec 2021 that “any emergency over Taiwan would mean an emergency for Tokyo as well”. By reiterating his support for Taiwan, Abe appeared to be pressuring the government of Prime Minister Fumio Kishida to continue his hardline approach towards China.

Hence, while Japanese allies such as the U.S. and European Union have been quick to condemn the assassination and expressed their shock over the loss of Abe, the opposite is happening in China. As the news of the Abe assassination spreads, celebrations began in China as all the social media platforms, including Weibo, WeChat and Youku were flooded with messages cheering the shooter.

A social media account of China Central Television saw a sudden surge in comments rejoicing the attack that killed Abe. Heck, one user on Chinese social media Weibo has even labelled the shooter a “hero”. While many sent death wish to Abe, one social media user has gone to the extent of offering money to the attacker for the assassination job.

One Weibo post which said it would be fitting if Abe atoned with his life for Japan’s invasion of China before World War II just a day after the 85th anniversary of the start of hostilities in 1937 has attracted more than 200,000 likes. Another user who said – “Let the celebrations begin!” – has received more than 150,000 likes within 30 minutes.

However, in a sign that the Chinese government didn’t want the nationalist sentiment to spiral out of control, Hu Xijin (former editor-in-chief and party secretary of the Global Times) wrote on Weibo before news Abe had died that “this is the time to put aside political disputes”. Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian said his country was shocked by the attack.

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