Tetsuya Yamagami

• 1. Introduction

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  Tetsuya Yamagami reached the northern exit of Yamato-Saidaiji Station in Nara at 11:30 on the morning of the 8th of July 2022, carrying a homemade shotgun. Across a road, Shinzo Abe stood in a traffic island, delivering a campaign speech. The former prime minister of Japan faced away from the station. Yamagami moved toward him. Abe's bodyguards did not notice.

  Yamagami fired once, seemingly hitting no one. The noise made Abe turn his head. Yamagami stepped closer and fired a second time. Abe collapsed. Bodyguards rushed Yamagami and held him to the ground. He made no attempt to flee and appeared calm throughout.

  When police arrested him at the scene, Yamagami was 41 years old. He had no prior criminal history and no employment. The initial charge of attempted murder became murder after Abe was pronounced dead.

  His trial began on the 28th of October 2025. A court in Nara sentenced him to life imprisonment on the 21st of January 2026. The question Japan spent those years debating was not simply what Yamagami had done. It was what had made him. The path back begins in Mie Prefecture, with a family that had been coming apart for decades.

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• 2. A Family in Collapse

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  Yamagami was born on the 10th of September 1980 in Mie Prefecture, the second child in a family that ran a local construction business. His father had graduated from the faculty of engineering at Kyoto University in 1970. In later years, the man suffered from alcoholic addiction and depression that Yamagami's mother attributed to work-related pressures. In 1984, when Yamagami was four years old, his father died by suicide.

  The family later moved to Higashiosaka. Yamagami grew up described by those who knew him as quiet and reserved. He graduated from Nara Prefectural Koriyama Senior High School in 1998 and wrote in his yearbook that he "didn't have a clue" what he wanted to do in life. He aimed to join the fire service, but near-sightedness stopped him from passing the required entrance test.

  Yamagami's older brother, about one year his senior, spent years fighting lymphoma that eventually cost him the sight in one eye. He could not afford medical treatment. He died by suicide in 2015. Yamagami's paternal uncle Toichiro later said this loss had a lasting impact on his nephew. Court filings would reveal that Yamagami had made a determination to keep himself alive at least until his brother died.

  Toichiro was the older brother of Yamagami's father. He had moved from a career in the construction contractor industry to obtain an attorney's licence and open a legal consulting firm in Osaka. After his brother's suicide in 1984, he began providing financial aid to the household. That support totaled about 20 million yen and continued until 2020. He was 77 years old at the time of Abe's assassination. He later recalled receiving calls from Yamagami and his siblings saying there was no food at home and that electricity and rent were often overdue. Those calls led him to bring meals and money for their day-to-day needs. Yamagami's mother often asked him directly for money to donate to a church, neglecting her children in the process. His frustration peaked to the point where he once threw a cup of tea at her and drove her away. The source of that chronic domestic need had one cause, and it was not ordinary hardship.

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• 3. The Church That Took Everything

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  Before her husband died, Yamagami's mother had already been involved in religious activities, having donated around 500,000 yen to a church group, payments that her husband and other family members opposed. Her path toward religious involvement had been marked by personal losses. Her own mother died in 1982, and her younger brother later died in a traffic accident.

  In August 1991, a follower of the Unification Church approached her. After she explained her husband's suicide and her eldest son's serious illness, she was advised that monetary donations would contribute to the "salvation" of her family. She made an initial donation of 20 million yen, funded by her late husband's life insurance. The following year she contributed 30 million yen more. She later gave about 10 million yen on the understanding that this payment would help ensure her late husband's peaceful afterlife.

  Around 1996, after her own father died, she sold the family home for roughly 40 million yen and donated the proceeds to the church. In 1998, when Yamagami was eighteen and considering university, she concluded that further donations were a higher priority than his education. Her eldest son was showing suicidal behavior, and she believed the church held an answer. Yamagami did not attend university. He enrolled in a vocational school instead, supported financially by his uncle.

  In 2002, having donated more than 100 million yen in total as well as family property, Yamagami's mother declared bankruptcy. Yamagami was 21 years old. She continued to make smaller donations to the Unification Church after that filing. She has remained a member of the church.

  In 2012, while his mother was traveling to South Korea, home of the UC's international headquarters, Yamagami sent her text messages that were later disclosed in court. He wrote: "It is absurd that you pretend to be a normal parent," "Maybe I should kill you and take the insurance money," and "I will disgrace you and make you regret it." That resentment had also surfaced years earlier, documented in military records from his time in the armed forces.

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• 4. A Soldier's Breaking Point

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  Yamagami joined the Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force in August 2002 and was posted to Kure Naval Base, assigned to a destroyer. He later moved to the General Affairs Department at the JMSDF 1st Service School in Etajima. The routine of military service provided a structure that his family circumstances had never offered.

  In February 2005, while still in uniform, Yamagami attempted suicide. He had learned that his mother had neglected his brother in order to attend Unification Church events in South Korea. He wanted his siblings to receive his life insurance payout after his death. A JMSDF investigation report recorded him saying that his "life had been ruined by the Unification Church," that his "brother and sister are in need," and that he wanted to "help them by giving them my life insurance." He was discharged from the JMSDF in August 2005 with the rank of leading seaman.

  Over the seventeen years after leaving the service, Yamagami worked for at least ten different companies. In December 2006 he took a part-time job at a surveying company and quit in June 2007. During two years of unemployment that followed, he obtained a real estate notary licence. He then moved between short-term positions, usually leaving each job after about half a year; the longest he stayed at any employer was about one and a half years. In October 2020 he began work as a forklift operator for a Kansai-region manufacturer in Kyoto Prefecture, where coworkers again described him as quiet. He resigned in May 2022, citing illness, and worked briefly for a temporary staffing firm in Osaka before leaving in early June 2022.

  The years of short-term work had left him in mounting debt with minimal savings. Alongside that instability, a more deliberate project had been taking shape.

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• 5. From Knife to Gun

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  From his early twenties, Yamagami had been circling the local Unification Church building with a knife. He was looking for an opportunity to kill Hak Ja Han, the church's leader. When Han visited Aichi Prefecture in October 2019, he planned a Molotov cocktail attack but could not enter the church building. He then purchased a pressure cooker to make a bomb. He abandoned that plan after concluding that an explosion could maim or kill bystanders. He turned instead to guns: weapons he believed he could "easily fix on a target."

  The shift to Abe came in September 2021. Yamagami learned that Abe had delivered a video speech to an event organized by a UC front organisation in which he praised Han. In the months that followed, Yamagami stalked Abe at various locations while finalizing his plan. He concluded that Abe had played a role in spreading the UC's influence in Japan. He also believed the same of Abe's maternal grandfather, former prime minister Nobusuke Kishi. In a letter to journalist Yonemoto on the 7th of July 2022, Yamagami described Abe as "not my enemy, originally, although I have had negative opinions about him." He wrote that Abe was "just one of the Unification Church's sympathizers who wields the most influence in the real world." Yonemoto edited a blog reporting on problems experienced by children of religious cult believers; Yamagami had been a regular commenter there under the handle "Mada Tari-nai."

  Nine days before the assassination, Yamagami also sent two private messages on Twitter to anti-cult journalist Eito Suzuki. The messages went unnoticed before his account was suspended. One included a question about a UC official whom Suzuki later deduced was Yun Young-ho, the then second-in-command of the church, expected to attend a ceremony in Urawa-ku, Saitama on the 10th of July 2022. Yamagami's Twitter account was registered as @333_hill, a reference to the Silent Hill video game franchise. That account had been created in October 2019, the same month Han had been scheduled to visit Aichi Prefecture.

  Yamagami began buying materials for weapon construction in spring 2021, learning the process from YouTube videos. He rented an apartment from March to September 2021 to dry homemade gunpowder produced from fertiliser. From November 2021 to February 2022, he rented a garage in Nara for 15,000 yen a month for the same purpose. Police later found seven homemade firearms at his home, two of them unfinished, along with possible explosive devices. The gun used on the 8th of July fired by means of a battery igniting gunpowder with an electric current. Yamagami had also test-fired weapons in the mountains of Nara Prefecture. On the 7th of July he fired a homemade gun at a facility linked to the Unification Church; investigators later found six bullet holes at the entrance of a building next to the Nara branch of the UC.

  At the time of the assassination, Yamagami was 600,000 yen in debt. He had 200,000 yen in savings and paid 30,000 yen a month in rent on his one-room apartment. Making weapons had proved costly, and the mounting debt pushed him to act. Also on the 7th of July, he traveled by Shinkansen to Okayama Prefecture, where Abe was appearing at an LDP rally. Entry protocols blocked him. He sent a letter from Okayama to Yonemoto that same day, enclosing a settlement document between the Unification Church and his family arranging the return of 50 million yen by the church. Yonemoto found the letter in his mailbox on the 13th of July, five days after the assassination. A draft copy was later recovered from Yamagami's computer.

  When Abe's schedule changed to include a stop in Nara on the 8th of July, Yamagami tracked his movements through Abe's website. His apartment was a five-minute walk from Shin-Omiya Station. The westbound next stop on the Kintetsu Nara line was Yamato-Saidaiji Station. Yamagami was transferred to the Nara Nishi Police Station in the immediate aftermath of his arrest there.

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• 6. Judgment in Nara

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  After his transfer, Yamagami was held at the Osaka Detention House, where prosecutors applied for a psychiatric evaluation before bringing formal charges. Such assessments in Japan typically last about three months; Yamagami's extended to nearly half a year. A journalist covering the proceedings speculated that prosecutors were allowing public sentiment over the assassination to settle before moving forward.

  The evaluation was initially set to conclude on the 29th of November 2022, but prosecutors sought an extension to the 6th of February 2023. After an appeal by Yamagami's legal team, the deadline was shortened and set as the 10th of January. On the 24th of December 2022, the Nara District Prosecutor's Office ruled Yamagami competent to stand trial. One cited factor was his demonstrated ability to construct the firearm used in the killing. He was formally charged with murder on the 13th of January 2023. Three additional charges were filed on the 30th of March 2023, bringing the total to four; one was later dismissed when prosecutors found insufficient evidence.

  Japanese media assessing likely sentencing pointed to a comparable case from 2007. Tetsuya Shiroo, a former gang leader, murdered Iccho Itoh during Itoh's campaign for re-election as mayor of Nagasaki City. The Nagasaki District Court sentenced Shiroo to death, citing "strong antisocial behavior which denies the foundation of democracy." The Fukuoka High Court and the Supreme Court overturned that ruling, reducing it to life imprisonment. The courts held that capital punishment was too severe for a conviction involving a single fatality.

  Shortly before the trial opened, Yamagami's mother gave an in-depth interview to the Japan News Network. She said her faith in the Unification Church's teachings had "only grown stronger since the assassination." She acknowledged that she had made excessive donations in the past. She rejected the view that those donations were the reason her son shot Abe, attributing the incident to the "lack of familial love." She told the interviewer: "If I had not been a mother, things would not have turned out like this." On the 13th of November 2025, she was called as a witness at the trial, where she apologized for her son's actions. Her physical appearance was concealed in court. She had also, in the period after the assassination, expressed apologies to Abe's widow, Akie Abe.

  At the first hearing, Yamagami admitted to killing Abe. His legal team argued that his homemade weapon did not meet the criteria of the Firearms and Swords Control Act. They asked that any sentence be automatically reduced on that basis. Well before the trial opened, a Change.org petition calling for a reduced sentence for Yamagami had collected over 8,700 signatures by the 8th of October 2022.

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• 7. Japan Confronts Itself

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  Abe's killing in July 2022 brought a term that most Japanese had rarely encountered in mainstream media to sudden prominence. Shukyo nisei, meaning "religious second generations," refers to children raised by parents whose religious devotion leads them to neglect or abuse their families. After the assassination, many such children began speaking publicly about their experiences, and pressure on the government to respond mounted.

  On the 13th of October 2023, after nearly a year of investigation into the Unification Church for misconduct, the responsible ministry filed a dissolution order against the UC with the Tokyo District Court. On the 25th of March 2025, the court upheld the dissolution order. The church was considering whether to appeal.

  Internationally, commentators in The Economist and The Atlantic described Yamagami as one of the most effective political assassins in recent history. In China, T-shirts printed with Yamagami's photograph from the day of the assassination were sold on online marketplaces and worn publicly. The reaction was attributed to resentment of Abe's historical positions on Japanese war crimes and his statements on Taiwan. Abe had also paid tributes at Yasukuni Shrine, where war criminals are commemorated. In Japan, Yamagami's family received gift money, food, clothing, and books through online gifting websites, according to his uncle Toichiro.

  When Yamagami's Twitter account was made public on the 17th of July 2022, his follower count rose from zero to over 45,000 within a single day. The account was suspended on the 19th of July for violating Twitter's policies. On the 10th of September 2022, Yamagami's 42nd birthday, social media carried messages of celebration under the hashtag "Tetsuya Yamagami birthday." Japanese people cosplaying his appearance during the assassination appeared at public events, including a rally against Abe's state funeral. They carried cardboard signs bearing the names of leaders they opposed: Ali Khamenei, Vladimir Putin, and Xi Jinping.

  One criminologist warned that Yamagami being "treated and followed like a revolutionary leader was alarming." Nine months after Abe's death, an attempted assassination of Prime Minister Fumio Kishida occurred; commentators believed the perpetrator had been influenced by Yamagami. Senior LDP member Masahiko Komura, a church supporter, argued that filing a dissolution order against the UC played into the hands of a terrorist. Others countered that this argument was logically fallacious. Allowing an organisation to escape accountability by citing a perpetrator's stated goal was not, they argued, a defensible position.

  A fictional film called Revolution+1, directed by Masao Adachi, premiered in small theatres across Japan on the day of Abe's state funeral. It was based on reports about Yamagami. Some theatres cancelled the screenings after receiving complaints citing "disrespect of the deceased" and "justification of terrorism." In a December 2022 editorial in The Japan Times, editor Kanako Takahara offered an explanation for the public sympathy. She wrote that "the investigations show that Yamagami had a very traumatized experience" and that "the anger or any emotions involved were simply transferred to the issues involving the Unification Church," while also stating that what Yamagami had allegedly done was wrong.

  Yamagami said from detention that he had not anticipated his actions would have such significant consequences. He was permitted to read newspapers and expressed a strong interest in broader societal issues. He could not reach a conclusion, he said, about whether the situation "is good or bad for other shukyo niseis." While refusing his mother's requests to visit him at the detention facility, he has continued to read and acknowledge letters from supporters. The dissolution case that his actions helped set in motion remained subject to a potential church appeal as of March 2025, when the Tokyo District Court announced its ruling.

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