Special election evening on all television channels when the results of the senatorial elections on Sunday July 10 are announced, with a few black suits as a sign of mourning and minutes of silence in the candidates’ campaign offices. Unsurprisingly, the ruling coalition in Japan has largely consolidated its majority in the Senate, two days after the assassination of former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, 67, one of the heavyweights of the Liberal Democratic Party (PLD), in power almost without interruption since the end of the war.
The PLD now has a “super majority” two-thirds of the Senate, ready to change the country’s pacifist Constitution to strengthen its military role on the world stage – a longtime goal of Shinzo Abe. But, despite the shock caused by the assassination of the former Prime Minister on Friday July 8, there was no tidal wave for his movement, the PLD, and the turnout was only 52%. Barely more than during the previous senatorial elections of 2019.
A “religious group”
Three days after Abe’s assassination, a Japanese media (Maïnichi shimbun) has, for the first time officially, cited the mysterious “religious group” to which the alleged killer alluded in his statements to the police. The suspect mentioned the Unification Church, a religious movement of South Korean origin, the “Moon sect”, named after its founder Sun Myung Moon.
Tetsuya Yamagami, 41, said his mother joined the cult in the late 1990s and donated all her savings to the movement. However, this money was originally intended to finance the higher education of his son. In a press conference on Monday (July 11), the president of the Japanese branch of the Unification Church, Tomihiro Tanaka, did confirm Yamagami’s mother’s membership in 1998, and revealed that she had been ruined four years later. Without dwelling on the financial details of this case, explaining that the police were continuing their investigation.
“The press did not dare to mention the Moon sect”
We also know a little more about the links between Shinzo Abe’s family and the sect. Kishi Nobusuke, the grandfather of the murdered prime minister, had forged ties with the Unification Church and its founder, Sun Myung Moon, in the early 1960s, in the midst of the Cold War. The historic dispute between South Korea and Japan (which colonized Korea for 50 years, editor’s note) had not prevented the alliance of the two men, united by their fierce anti-communism.
Firstly, “the press has not dared to quote the Moon sect, because it brings to the public knowledge dark realities about the way politics works in Japan, explains a Japanese journalist, who refuses to be quoted because of the sensitivity of the subject. A party like the PLD has benefited from many supports from the Moon sect or from Nippon Kaigi, of Shinto obedience, who wants to bring Japan back to the time of the radiant empire of the 1920s.. Some journalists now claim that Moon was largely funding the Japanese LDP.
“The Unification Church is not a religious organization, explained in the local press in 2019 the National Network of Lawyers Against Spiritual Commerce, a Japanese NGO. She has always had anti-social behavior and we call on politicians not to join her activities. »
Many Japanese are not fooled by these underground maneuvers. A reality that explains, in large part, their disaffection for politics and elections, and their conviction that nothing will change.