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Bad Karma? Abe's Assassination and the Moonies

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 March 2025

Jeff Kingston
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Abstract

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The assassination of Abe Shinzo in July 2022 not only felled a political giant, but also propelled the government to seek dissolution of the Unification Church (UC), known as the Moonies in the Anglophone world, because the gunman told police that he targeted Japan's longest serving prime minister (2012–2020) due to his links with the UC. Ironically, the South Korea-based UC enjoyed extensive influence in the Abe faction of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), a strange brew of clashing nationalisms given that Abe was an advocate of historical revisionism, a rightwing political movement that promotes an exonerating and glorifying narrative of Japan's shared past with Asia, while the UC was guilt-tripping donors about Japan's colonial rule in the Korean peninsula (1910–45).

Keywords

AbeUnification ChurchLDPMooniesJapanKoreaassassination
Type
Research Article
Information
Asia-Pacific Journal , Volume 21 , Issue 12 , December 2023 , e5
Creative Commons
Creative Common License - CCCreative Common License - BYCreative Common License - NCCreative Common License - ND
This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is unaltered and is properly cited. The written permission of Cambridge University Press must be obtained for commercial re-use or in order to create a derivative work.
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 2023

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