Japan on Saturday marked the one-year anniversary of the shooting death of former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe by a man angry about his links to the South Korean Unification Church while he was addressing an election event.
The assassination of the country’s longest-serving prime minister has rocked Japan, where armed violence is unusual.
Prime Minister Fumio Kishida and other senior officials and lawmakers joined Abe’s widow at a private memorial service held at a Buddhist temple in Tokyo. The public was allowed to lay flowers after the memorial service.
Abe is remembered for pursuing economic policies aimed at ending years of deflation.
Those policies included aggressive monetary easing, fiscal stimulus, and deregulation. But critics say the measures have created an income gap.
Abe, who resigned in 2020, was also advocating a tough defense policy that caused an increase in military spending and an amendment to Japan’s pacifist constitution to allow Japanese troops to be sent on combat missions outside the country for the first time since World War II.
Kishida backed away from Abe’s economic agenda but maintained his predecessor’s hardline policies and announced last year that Japan would double defense spending.
Abe’s death sparked angry popular reactions against the ruling Free Democratic Party, after the emergence of close links between it and the Unification Church.
Tetsuya Yamagami, 42, is suspected of using a hand-made metal and wood firearm to kill Abe, who was 67 when he was assassinated.