On Tuesday, thousands of people took part in the funeral procession for former Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, who was killed on Friday, in front of symbolic sites in Tokyo after the funeral ceremonies.
The ceremony took place in the afternoon at the Zogoji Buddhist temple in the center of the Japanese capital with the participation of the widow of Abe Aki and the current Prime Minister Fumio Kishida. A large number of people spontaneously went to the temple in honor of the 37-year-old leader, whose murder shocked the country.
“I am shocked and angry. I can’t handle my sadness, so I came to lay flowers and pray,” Tsukasa Yukawa, 41, told AFP. “I respected him a lot. He was a great prime minister and did a lot to promote Japan’s presence in the world,” he added. A public honoring ceremony is to be held later in Tokyo in Yamaguchi Prefecture (southwest), of which Abe was one of the representatives in parliament.
the highest medal
After the funeral, the procession left the temple and passed by the political institutions where Abe held office during his career: parliament, the prime minister and the headquarters of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (national right). In front of each headquarters, ministers, officials and civil servants bowed their hands as the procession passed.
Aki Abe sat in front of a black car and held a wooden tablet with the name given to her husband after his death, according to Buddhist tradition. More than 2,000 people attended Abe’s farewell at the same temple on Monday, including Kishida representing Emperor Naruhito, as well as Japanese political and economic figures and foreign diplomats.
US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, who is already in Tokyo for talks ahead of the G20 finance ministers’ meeting in Bali, said goodbye to Abe, and Taiwan’s vice president made a special visit to Tokyo for the occasion.
Japanese Foreign Minister Yoshimasa Hayashi said on Tuesday that a total of more than 1,700 messages of condolence had been received from 259 countries, regions and international organizations. According to local media reports, Abe will be awarded the Grand Order of the Chrysanthemum, the highest in the archipelago.
On Friday, Abe came under fire as he participated in a campaign rally in Nara, western Japan, ahead of a dismal election to renew half of the Senate seats, in which Abe’s Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), as expected, won a comfortable victory. Police have identified the suspect in the murder, who was arrested at the scene, as Tetsuya Yamagami, 41, a former member of the Japanese Navy. Sources familiar with the investigation told local media that Yamagami watched YouTube videos in which he learned how to make firearms at home similar to the one used in the attack.
religious group
The suspect confirmed that he deliberately targeted Abe because he believed he belonged to an unnamed organization. According to Japanese media reports, he blames the group, described as a religious organization, for the financial difficulties his family is facing, given that his mother gave her large donations.
On Monday, the Unification Church, a global religious movement founded in Korea in the 1950s, said Yamagami’s mother was a member but indicated that Abe was neither a member nor an adviser. Abe comes from a prominent political family and was the country’s youngest post-war prime minister when he first came to power in 2006 at 52. He served as the longest serving prime minister in the country’s history in 2006-2007 and then again from late 2012 until the summer of 2020. Abe was both a nationalist and a pragmatist, and his career shaped his economic policies, which he called “Abenomics,” which combine increased budgets, monetary flexibility, and structural reforms. He wanted to amend the Japanese pacifist constitution, which had been drafted by the occupying Americans in 1947 and had not been changed since. He was forced to resign for health reasons, but remained a very influential figure in his party, which he led for a long time.
