Shinzo Abe, Japan’s longest-serving former prime minister, has been shot dead during a campaign speech in one of the most significant acts of political violence to rock the country in the postwar era.
Abe’s death at the age of 67 was reported by state broadcaster NHK. He was shot twice in the neck and left collarbone at around 11.30am local time on Friday in the western city of Nara, according to the fire department.
The shooting of one of the most influential modern leaders in Japan Japan, a society where violence is rare and only a handful of people own guns, has shocked the country’s public and leaders around the world.
“This is a heinous act of brutality that is utterly unforgivable,” said Fumio Kishida, the current prime minister of Japan, before Abe’s death was reported.
Police arrested a 41-year-old male suspect at the site of the shooting. Images from the scene suggested the assailant used a homemade weapon.
Nara police named the suspect as Tetsuya Yamagami, a resident of the city, with no known occupation. According to the defence ministry, he served in the Japanese Maritime Self-Defence Force from 2002 to 2005.
Inejirō Asanuma, then-head of the Japan Socialist party, was the last high-profile Japanese politician to be killed, after a stabbing in 1960. There was an assassination attempt against former prime minister Morihiro Hosokawa in 1994.
Since stepping down as prime minister two years ago, Abe had remained an influential member of parliament as head of the ruling Liberal Democratic party’s largest faction.
Videos from the scene in Nara showed him giving a speech to support a local LDP candidate near Yamato-Saidaiji station in the city’s suburbs. Two loud shots were audible and a puff of white smoke was visible behind the former prime minister.
Two students who witnessed the shooting told public broadcaster NHK that they saw something “resembling a toy bazooka” and heard a loud bang when Abe was shot the first time.
“He didn’t collapse, we just heard a very loud bang, but it didn’t seem like anything happened to him,” said one of the students. She said that smoke was “clearly visible after the second shot” and that “Mr Abe collapsed the moment the second shot was fired”.
During his two stints in office from 2006 to 2007 and 2012 to 2020, Abe was known for his economic revival plan and his conservative views on history.
Launched in 2012, the stimulus programme, known as Abenomics, aimed to lift the Japanese economy out of decades of deflation.
Abe also held hawkish opinions on history and reforming the pacifist constitution to expand Japan’s military role — an agenda he continued to champion following his resignation due to ill health.
Before the shooting on Friday, the former prime minister was campaigning for Sunday’s elections for Japan’s upper house. The elections will go ahead as scheduled, an official at the internal affairs ministry told the Financial Times.
During the campaign, Abe fiercely defended the legacy of his economic programme and urged the public to support a boost in defence spending in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Beyond his economic policy, Abe pushed for free trade and promoted his vision of a “free and open Indo-Pacific”, a stance taken up by Kishida and US president Joe Biden as they build a series of alliances in the region to counter an increasingly aggressive China.
Additional reporting by Nobuko Juji in Tokyo