 Everyone, this is Steve Zurker. I'm your host of the ThinkTech program, Looking to the East. This is a show I do twice a month. We look at various political, economic, social issues focusing primarily on Japan and greater Asia. Today's show, we're going to be looking at the repercussions from the assassination that occurred in Japan, the shocking assassination of the former prime minister of Japan. His name is Shinzo Abe. That was back in February. I have with us a very special guest, the president of Shinketsu News in Japan, Michael Penn. And Michael was actually the journalist who broke the story after the assassination occurred as to which religious organization was affiliated with the assassin. The story came out after the Abe assassination that the motivation for the assassination had to do with the religion. And in Japan, as the media is want to do, they didn't actually disclose which church it was. But Michael did that, broke the story. And then after that, the other mainstream media and international press as well began to acknowledge that it was the unification church that was involved. So we're going to talk about that over the course of the show. Michael, thank you so much for rejoining me on the show. I really appreciate it. You acknowledge experts in this area. I think for our viewers, maybe they probably remember when Abe was assassinated because it was an international news story. I mean, whenever my mother contacts me about news in Japan, I know it's getting international coverage. That's my sign that something from Japan that she's reading about it. Her reaction was one of shock and kind of sympathy too. Because in her mind, Abe was a positive government official for Japan. But anyway, can you describe what happened back in February a bit just for our viewers who may not remember that? Well, first of all, we're talking about July, not February. Oh, I'm sorry. You're doing a little bit earlier in the year. So yeah, well, I think most people know this part of the story, which is that former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe was giving a speech at the side of a road. And a man in his early 40s who had put together a homemade shotgun came up behind him. And shot him twice. And as a result of those wounds, Abe died. And it was, of course, as you know, a very shocking event because, well, first of all, gun crimes of that sort just don't happen in Japan. And also because a political assassination of that scale hasn't happened in the country in about half a century. So it was a big event. It was a shocking event. And it had the real political impact. As you recall, at that time, what was the expectations in terms of how the country would respond to this assassination? You know, it was a huge story. I think the initial response was shock. But then, I mean, I remember that this could cause greater strength of the Jemento Party, a sense of sympathy for Abe. Some of my friends have said this could be a JFK moment. Those of you that are old enough, I certainly remember when Kennedy was assassinated in the United States and what the repercussions of that were, which were immense. But was that what I'm describing is was that a accurate depiction of what the expectations were from your perspective? Because you're much, much closer to it than I am. Certainly, I think that both within the country and outside of Japan, people who are observers of Japan, let's say for the first week or week and a half, sort of the common sense or the general view was that this was going to strengthen the political right in the country, because people would be worried about violence. And he was a major figure. And the assassination of such a figure, as you mentioned, engender sympathy even from those who might not otherwise have been terribly attracted to his point of view. So from those points of view, everybody was more or less expecting that this was something that was going to strengthen the right. And it has to be said there was a full court press, both within the conservative elements of the Japanese government, as well as in Washington, D.C., to really promote this idea that, okay, well, Abe has been killed, but now we have a chance to really implement the Abe agenda. And there was really the strong, strong push that Abe might be gone, but the Abe politics and the things that Abe wanted to do for Japan or due to Japan were now going to happen. And so that was the initial expectation, which obviously we're going to talk about next, didn't quite work out that way. This is just the amazing thing and why politics is so interesting. The repercussions from this assassination are completely different from what we described. For example, you mentioned the Abe agenda. Abe was always focusing on changing the constitution of Japan to make it the military able to be offensive, because when the constitution was written by the Americans back after World War II, that was explicitly banned. The Japanese military supposedly is for defensive purposes only. So I remember that, Michael, that now this is going to happen. So tell us what really happened in the subsequent months since July. The first thing that really kind of drew that off track was the assassin himself. Most people I think kind of assumed or feared or believed that most likely this assassin was probably somebody on the left, somebody who hated Abe's politics. And so as it became clear that somehow this assassination was somewhere out of left field, it kind of threw the narrative off track. And it was not somebody who was a leftist. It was not somebody who could be easily dismissed as just some sort of insane, crazy person. It was somebody who had a motive, a motive that nobody expected and nobody even really knew about. And someone who as the story of the assassin became more better and better reported, the reaction from the Japanese public was, wait a second, we kind of understand where this guy was coming from. And there was a lot more sympathy for the assassin and his background and what he had gone through and why he came to the conclusion that he did, that he needed to assassinate the former prime minister. And of course, this is where the Unification Church story came in, which was on nobody's radar. I mean, even those people who have essentially dedicated their career to studying Shinzo Abe and his policies, this was not something that had been explored and was even realized. So basically it was the assassin and his life story, which threw everything off track from what one might have expected to have happened. And then the fact that the Japanese public, the more and more they learned about the assassin, the more and more they sympathized with him and liked him actually. And that was not the reaction that you normally expect in a situation where a private assassin kills the leader, the longest serving leader of a country, right? That's not the way things to go. Yeah, that was remarkable. So I think you're absolutely right that the narrative was set by the conservative elements, how we're going to take this assassination in, like Rahm Emanuel says, you never waste a crisis, right? So this was a crisis and they had their strategy and then it turned out, I don't think anybody thinks that the murder is forgivable. He's a murder. He's a criminal and he'll end up in jail for the rest of his life. But I do believe, I agree with you, Michael, that his story resonated and specifically he explained that his mother was captured by the Unification Church and gave $800,000, basically the family's life savings to the church, making their family go bankrupt, taking away the chances for this young man to go to college. And he apparently is a fairly bright guy and could have gotten into a pretty decent school. So yeah, I guess the Japanese medium, thinking of the immunity and other conservative elements, I guess they couldn't really contextualize that into the story that they started with. That's it, isn't it? That's the problem. Well, that's it. But then once the initial wave, obviously, thinking there's going to be sort of a right wing crackdown, the Abe agenda was going to be in place, then the second stage was, hey, wait a second, this assassin is not what we expected. The public actually has sympathy for him. And then there was the third stage which came up, which is that the assassin and his research and his motives for killing Abe were not based on some fantasy as was first sort of intimated by the media, but actually he was onto something real, which even the deepest, many of the deepest experts about Shinza Abe didn't know about. And then once the media started to get on that story, and like, wait a second, there is actually a connection between Shinza Abe and the Unification Church and it's real. And it goes back to his grandfather and his father. And this is basically what we've seen play out in the month since, is that the Japanese media and other parts of the Japanese media has really gotten on the story to explore how Tetsuya Yamagami, the assassin, was right in his research, was correct in his research about Abe's connection with the church and how it actually was much deeper and bigger than was understood. And that in fact, almost half of all ruling party lawmakers had some, at least tenuous connection with the Unification Church. So step by step, this is what has sort of developed. And of course, the Japanese public, which first went from shock over, they went from shock over Abe's assassination and sympathy for, let's say, Akiyama Abe, the former first lady, to sympathy to the assassin. And then in that third stage, the public starts getting outraged to learn that some sort of what many Japanese would think is kind of like a crazy South Korean cult has enormous, or at least a degree of political influence in the ruling party and links that were totally unknown. And so then what Yamagami himself had wanted, which was to throw attention on the church and to basically get his revenge against the church actually happened. Because basically the majority of the Japanese public came to share Yamagami's view that these people are a problem and that they need to be basically expelled from influence in the Japanese political system, which they have had. So it's really been a remarkable process. And of course, the overall effect is that from where we started, that this would be something which would help conservatives and help the right wing in Japan, it's actually turned into the very opposite, which is that it's put the Japanese right wing on the back feet. They're in big trouble. The whole Abe faction within the Liberal Democratic Party has been defending itself and in trouble. And the influence has been cut down rather than boosted. Yeah, I was mentioning to Michael before we started the show. I don't watch TV other than baseball. I do watch baseball and have hanchin tigers in particular. But at my gym in the sauna, they have a TV. So I'm usually there in the afternoon when they have these news quasi news programs, I guess you call them Michael. And at least two or three times, there's this solemn looking, Jiminto ruling party, diet representative, lowly describing in detail his connections to the unification church. You know, on July 17, 2020, I went to their party or I did a video. It's confessional. And all of these guys are being forced to do this. It's just remarkable. I was telling Michael, I have a Catholic, I'm a lapsed Catholic. So it reminds me of going into the confessional box and talking to the priest and explaining about the sins that you've done over the last month or so. I just am amazed that these guys are being forced to do this. And this has now been going on for months and months and months, and doesn't seem to be going away. Well, to pick up on that last point, why it's not going away so easily. This is where the ruling party messed up its response. And part of this goes to Prime Minister Fumio Kishida, because the things actually Kishida's own instincts were correct. He himself, by the way, had no connection whatsoever with the unification church. Oh, really? Okay. And he's from the more moderate faction. He's not the abbey faction. He's basically the opposite of the abbey faction in many ways. But his instinct was, okay, let's just be completely transparent about this. Let's have an investigation within the party, and everybody who had some connection with the unification church published that, get it out there and go through it and it'll be done. But he has not gotten cooperation from the party on this. In particular, the secretary general of the party, who's the number two person in the party, his name is Toshimitsu Motegi, who the prime minister depends on very much to stay in power, had the opposite opinion. He's like, no, no, no, let's just put out a couple dozen names. We'll do our own survey. We're not going to actually investigate anybody. We'll just send a survey to all of the lawmakers and let them self-report. This is standard operating procedure for any kind of crisis at the LDP or political parties in general. That's plan A. Well, this is, yeah, in particular, I think the Liberal Democratic Party, it's sort of like the honor system in a sense with people whose honor can sometimes be a little shaky. So basically, there was within the party, there was this sense of let's cover things up a little bit. And the thing is, some of the people who were the most guilty of the Unification Church ties included people like the policy chief of the ruling party, his name is Koichi Hagiuda. He basically came to power as an aide to Shienzo Abe. And basically, it is that Abe faction, the hard right wing of the ruling party, which had the strongest connections with the Unification Church, which they're completely unable to defend because how do they defend basically a Korean church coming to Japan, getting all this money from ordinary citizens, bankrupting Japanese families, and using that to fund their organization. I mean, from the point of view of Japanese conservatives who tend to be very anti-Korean and even racist, how do they justify that? They can't even justify it to their own supporters. And so from the point of view of the ruling party, many of them don't want to be completely honest about what happened, especially the Abe wing. So the prime minister whose position depends on support from within the ruling party, obviously, is not in a position to demand completely that they obey and that they submit to a serious investigation. So this is where they've had the problem. The political impact has mostly been on Kishida himself, who's not the most guilty person. He's just simply not able to control the ruling party as effectively as he might like. Yeah. To that point, Michael, his popularity has been going down since this assassination occurred. And this morning, it was reported that there are more Japanese people now who disapprove of him than approve of him. 46% disapprove, 45% approve. Yeah, there are two causes for that I should mention, both related to Shinzo Abe. One is the Unification Church link, and the other is his decision to hold a state funeral for Shinzo Abe, which by a nearly two to one margin, the Japanese public came to oppose. That occurred just last week, right? And you're recovering that. Can you briefly describe why that occurred and the tremendous pushback? I read that there were protests on the day of the state funeral itself, which for Japan, usually Japanese people are somewhat compliant when it comes to this kind of stuff. They do go up and protest like, for example, the Iraq invasion, there were protests almost every day for that. But usually, these types of outward shows of displeasure with the government, especially on a day of funeral was shocking. So can you cover that briefly? We unfortunately, we only have about seven or eight more minutes in the show. Well, again, that was also something which certainly took me by surprise as well, that the protest movement would really take issue state funeral issue and protest, as you say, marching in the streets hundreds of people against a funeral for a leader who would assassinated the longest serving prime minister in many ways is kind of bizarre. But it turned out to be a big issue, a couple of reasons. Now, why was the state funeral held? Well, that's obvious. So the prime minister thought he could curry favor with the obey wing of the party by doing the state funeral. It was smart politics. It seemed like smart politics at the time. Internal politics. Exactly. But that's who he really depended on to stay in power, to kind of keep them happy with a symbolic measure, whereas instead of a substantial policy measure. But the reaction from the public was, first of all, we only had one state funeral under the current constitution since World War Two. And that was for Prime Minister Yoshida, who was very, very much important in putting Japan on its current path. And so this was not the way that prime ministers were usually buried. There was not state funerals. There was a lot of people who were like, well, wait a second, Abe is a very divisive figure. He basically represents the hard right. And yet to have a state funeral for somebody like that, who's not a consensus figure, who was not even particularly popular at the time of his death. Again, this was sort of like the government trying to push its own political agenda with, I mean, again, don't underestimate how big support from Washington and the Pentagon is in all of this. They wheeled enormous influence in Tokyo and Abe was their man. And so there was also that side of it. And then there was lots of things about, okay, we have to pay for the funeral. That was the cost work. Really? I saw seven million? Is that correct or? I couldn't remember off the top of my head. But basically, most of the costs were because if you have all these world leaders coming in at the beginning, then Japan goes overboard on security costs and things like this. So most of that money went to police and various kinds of security. And then also the fact that people are saying, well, wait a second, now are we basically forced to be, to mourn for this guy who not everybody wants to mourn for and with the unification church story coming out at the same time and Abe's links with that. And everybody was kind of like saying, Abe had all these scandals. He did a lot and a lot of the negative side of the Abe legacy was coming. In fact, I've been calling it de-Aubefication of Japanese politics. We have seen in the past few months, since his assassination really, that sort of like a veil of fear is lifting from Japanese politics. Abe basically was sort of a scary figure, I think, for a lot of people. And now he's not there. And now people are not afraid of him anymore. Now people are coming out and more openly criticizing. And it's both within and outside of the government. So it is kind of like, like I said, kind of a de-Aubefication process where suddenly, like after a repressive regime has gone, suddenly things come out. And that's sort of where we've been for the past couple of months. So you mentioned that Kishita is bearing the brunt of the story about the unification church connection to 50 percent of the ruling party. And also not just the ruling party, but other party as well. Although the numbers, as you pointed out, Michael, are much smaller in that regard. And the state funeral has not helped him at all. So there's repercussions there. Then we also have inflation. My coffee prices just went up a couple of days ago, Michael. I came up with Family Mart, 150 to 180 yen. So Japanese consumers now are seeing the prices are being raised and there's a sense of frustration that the government's really not focusing on that either. Do you think that Kishita is going to survive? I mean, he's clearly wounded. And Japan has a long history of turning prime ministers over. Abe, of course, was an exception. But there are long stretches of time when there'd be a prime minister once a year. And Kishita, I think, celebrating his one year in power just this week. Well, if I can get you to look into the crystal ball, is he going to survive? My strong feeling is that yes, he'll survive and he will actually return to popularity before too long. For a couple of reasons. First of all, all of the problems which are hitting him and which has depressed his public opinion rating have nothing to do with him. They're all about Abe and the right wing of the party. He is not Abe. He is not a right wing of the party. He's actually from the other wing of the party and which is kind of the irony. All the things which have been sinking him have nothing to do with him. And his own particular political agenda, which he calls new capitalism, is to try to raise the living standards of ordinary people and to try to reduce inequality between rich and poor. Basically, all that Kishita has to do to recover is to begin to act like Kishita, to really assert his own policies and his own agenda and he'll be back. And he has a really good one other thing, which is majorly in his favor. There's no elections anywhere in sight. There's unified local elections next spring, but national elections are years away. This was supposed to be his so-called three golden years because there's just nothing on the schedule for him. So I think he has plenty of time to get things back in order. The state funerals done, that issue is now off the plate. He does still have to deal with the unification church mess, but that all is going to lose steam and it's probably already losing steam. So if Kishita can just be Kishita and be a little more assertive, then I think he will begin to recover his popularity. Yeah, we just have one more minute. The engineers are telling me, but your last thought, Michael, this man who planned this assassination, what's happening? Would he even imagine that what he did would cause this response in the country? I mean, again, it's no justification for murder, but he accomplished what he wanted to accomplish, apparently. I mean, I think beyond, I would imagine, his wildest dreams. I mean, nobody could have predicted this. I don't think even he would have predicted it. He probably felt it was kind of a desperate effort to try to do it, but whether he actually thought it could have happened the way that it happened, I doubt it. I mean, it was, this honestly has to be said to be one of the most successful assassinations in modern history, because not only did he kill the person that he wanted, he also helped destroy his real target and essentially politically things worked out exactly the way that the assassin would have dreamed it worked out. It's an amazing story. Yeah. Michael, are you going to write that story? Probably. Somebody needs to do that. This is just so huge. Yeah, I have lots of things on my plate, but it is a fascinating story. I think it's going to make a brilliant book for somebody. Okay. All right, Michael. Well, it's been a pleasure. Thank you so much for your insights, spending time with us and helping to describe what's going on in Japan and the best to you. For my viewers, we'll be on again with looking to the east in a couple of weeks or so. We'll address another topic having to do with Japan or more broadly in Asia. I haven't decided what that is at this point, but do tune in at that time. Thank you again, Michael. Thank you everyone for watching. That's a wrap for today.