Rare political killing in post-war Japan

Tribune News Service

New Delhi, July 8

From a time when assassination of top politicians was a norm from the Meiji Restoration in 1868 to the mid-1930s, Japan turned into a relatively tranquil society on the surface after World War II. But attempts on the lives of politicians continued. Despite Japan’s acceptance of its role in World War II, there were secretive cults that glorified the Samurai culture.

The biggest political assassination that rocked Japan was in 1960, when a youth stabbed to death a leader from the opposition Japan Socialist Party, Inejiro Asanuma, at a political rally in Tokyo. Ironically, the assassin (17) belonged to the extreme right-wing Great Japan Patriotic Society, which espoused the same values as the Nippon Kaigi — to which Shinzo Abe belonged. The same year Abe’s grandfather and then PM Nobusuke Kishi was stabbed in the thigh and severely injured during a reception at the PM’s Office. In 1975, PM Takeo Miki, in 1992 Deputy PM Shin Kanemaru, and in 1994 PM Morihiro Hokosawa were attacked, but all of them survived.

The second major political assassination took place over 40 years after Asanuma was killed. A gangster allegedly hacked to death Koki Ishi, a parliamentarian from the opposition Democratic Party of Japan in 2002. More recently, Nagasaki Mayor Iccho Ito was campaigning in 2007 when he was shot and killed by a senior member of a crime organisation.

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