Assassination of Shinzo Abe

Tetsuya Yamagami (山上 徹也) is a Japanese man who has admitted to assassinating Shinzo Abe, the former Prime Minister of Japan, on 8 July 2022.

A resident of Nara, he was arrested at the scene of the assassination.

He was 41 years old, had no prior criminal history, and was unemployed at the time of his arrest.

Yamagami was born on 10 September 1980 in Mie Prefecture to affluent parents who ran a local construction business.

Described as quiet and reserved in high school, he wrote in his graduation yearbook that he "didn't have a clue" what he wanted to do in the future.

In an interview with the Asahi Shimbun, a relative stated that Yamagami had been struggling since childhood with the Unification Church that his mother had become a member of.

After the death of his maternal grandfather, his mother inherited ownership of the family business.

Yamagami's maternal uncle, the younger brother of Yamagami's mother, died in a traffic accident; Yamagami's maternal grandmother died in 1982, which shocked Yamagami's mother.

She is reportedly still a member of the Unification Church after Abe's assassination and is apologetic for the church over her son's alleged crimes.

Yamagami's paternal uncle, the older brother of Yamagami's father, who provided many accounts about Yamagami's family, was 77 years old when Abe was assassinated.

Originally working in the construction contractor industry, he obtained an attorney's licence and started his own legal consulting firm in Osaka.

Despite being a lawyer himself, he will not represent Yamagami during the latter's criminal proceedings.

Yamagami's father committed suicide by jumping in 1984, when Yamagami was four years old.

After Yamagami's father's death by suicide in 1984, he had been providing financial aid to Yamagami's family for about 20 million yen, up until 2020 when Japan was hit by the COVID-19 pandemic.

Yamagami's mother often asked him for money to donate to the Unification Church while neglecting her children, to the point that he once threw a cup of tea on her in a fit of rage.

For the whole year since the assassination, Yamagami refused to respond to his mother's requests for visitation in the detention centre, while he was reading and expressing appreciation to letters from his supporters.

Yamagami graduated from Nara Prefectural Koriyama Senior High School in 1998, with plans of becoming a firefighter, but was unable to pass a required test due to his near-sightedness.

Yamagami did not attend university due to his family's financial problems, and instead attended a vocational school with financial support from his uncle, a since-retired lawyer.

Yamagami joined the Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force (JMSDF) in August 2002; he was posted to Kure Naval Base and assigned to the destroyer JS Matsuyuki.

In February 2005, while in the military, Yamagami attempted suicide in hope of his siblings receiving his life insurance payout after learning that his mother neglected his brother to attend Unification Church events in South Korea.

In an investigation report written by the JMSDF, Yamagami stated that his "life had been ruined by the Unification Church", and that his "brother and sister are in need", wanting to "help them by giving them my life insurance".

He moved to the General Affairs Department at the JMSDF 1st Service School in Etajima.

He was discharged from the JMSDF in August 2005 as a quartermaster with the rank of leading seaman.

After the JMSDF, Yamagami worked for at least 10 different companies for 17 years until the assassination.

In December 2006, he worked in a surveying company as a part-timer, and quit in June 2007.

He remained unemployed for 2 years and, during that period, he obtained the licences of assistant surveyor and real estate notary.

Since then he mostly took short-term part-time jobs or dispatched labour and quit swiftly for personal reasons, usually just after about half a year of employment.

The longest job he remained at lasted about one and a half years.

Yamagami's older brother, who had a longtime struggle with lymphoma which led to him losing eyesight in one eye, was not able to afford medical treatment; he died by suicide in 2015.

This greatly impacted Yamagami, according to his uncle.

Yamagami's younger sister and mother refused to be interviewed by the media.

They were about 37 and 70 years old respectively at the time of Abe's assassination.

For about a month after the assassination, Yamagami's mother lived in Yamagami's paternal uncle's home, before she moved to Osaka alone under the assistance of someone from the Unification Church.

In October 2020, Yamagami started working as a forklift operator in Kyoto Prefecture for a manufacturer that operated in the Kansai region.

There, he was described as quiet.

He quit in May 2022 after claiming that he was "feeling unwell".

After that, Yamagami briefly worked under another temporary staffing firm in Osaka Prefecture until he resigned in early June 2022.

On 8 July 2022, Tetsuya Yamagami appeared at the northern exit of Yamato-Saidaiji Station, Nara at 11:30 am, where Shinzo Abe was delivering a campaign speech for a Liberal Democratic Party candidate in the upcoming Upper House election.

Abe was positioned inside a traffic island of the crossroad, facing away from the train station.

Yamagami was situated behind Abe, with a street separating them.