The Vivid History of Assassinations in Japanese Politics

T he assassination of Shinzo Abe is shocking. The former Japanese prime minister, the longest-serving leader in the history of that office, was gunned down today with a homemade shotgun while giving a speech at a campaign rally in Nara for a parliamentary candidate. This seems jarringly out of character for 21st-century Japan, a nation that is proverbial for its orderliness and respect for hierarchy, effectively purged of firearms, and steeped in 77 years of pacifist tradition after the self-inflicted horrors of the Second World War. A baffled Joe Biden even claimed, with characteristic inaccuracy, that Abe’s assassination “is the first use of a weapon to murder someone in Japan.”

In fact, assassinations have a vivid, traumatic, and influential history in Japanese politics. One hopes that the Abe assassination, while it may revive memories of that history, will remain a one-off product of individual derangement.

Rise and Fall of the Shoguns

The story of modern Japan begins in the late 16th century. Medieval Japan was organized around feudal lines; while its unbroken line of monarchs claimed the title of emperor as early as the seventh century, its national government was weak. Japanese scholars of the 17th and 18th centuries referred to China as the “Central Country” and contrasted its centralizing tendencies with their own land’s devolution of power from the increasingly symbolic emperor to the daimyos, the lords of the feudal domains.

The adoption from the West of firearms in the mid 1500s gave a powerful advantage to a series of ambitious leaders who had national rather than merely local ambitions. The first of these was Oda Nobunaga, a ruthless pioneer in modern musketry who had his own brother killed to consolidate his position. Yet, at the peak of his power in 1582, Nobunaga was ambushed by one of his generals and compelled — along with his eldest son — to commit seppuku, the ritual warrior suicide.

The trend Nobunaga had started was too powerful to be stopped by assassination, however. After the watershed Battle of Sekigahara in 1600, Tokugawa Ieyasu reigned supreme as shogun and unquestioned leader of the feudal domains, a position the Tokugawa family would retain until 1868. Every daimyo or samurai family’s property, rights, and social status for two and a half centuries would be determined by reference to the side they fought on at Sekigahara. While the emperor remained the nominal sovereign, the shogun in 1615 issued a law requiring emperors to devote themselves to scholarship, apart from politics.

The daimyos built standing armies, as samurai were compelled by law to choose the life of a full-time warrior attached to a lord, or abandon their status and arms. The daimyos disarmed the countryside to secure their rule within their domains — as a 1588 edict by Nobunaga’s successor put it, “the possession of unnecessary implements [of war] makes difficult the collection of taxes and dues and tends to foment uprising.” Because Japan’s borders were almost entirely closed to the outside world from 1600 to 1853, there was a long absence from war, during which the samurai class grew more ritualized and impractical.

Change arrived in the form of the United States Navy and Commodore Matthew Perry in 1853, followed closely by the Russian navy. Japan had long maintained trade with the West via a Dutch trading station but kept Westerners from entering Japanese harbors or setting foot on Japanese soil. The incapacity of the shogun or the samurai to resist the American and Russian navies was a national humiliation. A movement began to restore Emperor Komei, who vocally rejected engagement with the outside world, and regenerate Japanese defenses.

Over the decade and a half between 1853 and 1868, the power of the shogun waned, and ultimately the young Emperor Meiji (who succeeded his father in 1867) asserted his sovereignty. By 1873, the domains had been abolished and the samurai banned from wearing swords in public. A revolution had taken place in Japanese governance.

How did it happen? At first glance, it may seem curious: The shogunate’s authority leached away gradually, and only at the end was there a brief period of open warfare. The shogun lost power neither through constitutional means nor by a full contest of arms. It might seem that the Tokugawas simply lost their nerve.

What that storyline misses, however, is a major campaign of assassinations by disgruntled, often impecunious, samurai, many of them ronin, who served no lord. The assassinations, frequently carried out by public ambushes, progressively robbed the shoguns of their most vigorous and able advisers and intimidated the rest.

The highlight of this reign of terror was the spectacular assassination of Ii Naosuke in March 1860. Ii was the chief minister and regent to the underaged shogun, and he conducted an energetic campaign to assert more centralizing power in the shogunate independent of the emperor, expand trade with the West, suppress the ronin and the rebellious daimyos, and generally modernize the nation under the shogun. In 1858, he concluded trade treaties with the United States, Holland, Russia, Britain, and France that the emperor opposed. Like Oda Nobunaga, he seemed to be accumulating new and destabilizing powers. An unprecedented letter of censure from the emperor was all the cover of legitimacy the assassins needed.

On a snowy day, Ii Naosuke was being carried in a sedan chair, his bodyguards covering their swords to keep them dry. Sixty swordsmen, including 26 samurai, descended upon the procession. For a time, they were held off by a single bodyguard fighting with swords in both hands as Ii’s sedan-bearers fled. Eventually, the valiant swordsman was overwhelmed and killed, and Ii was first stabbed, then pulled from his sedan chair and beheaded. After that, the violence accelerated, and no leader came forward to fill Ii’s shoes or revive his program. Within a decade, the centuries-old shogunate had collapsed.

Bloodshed between the Wars

The era that began with the Meiji Restoration was, until Meiji’s death in 1912, one of national unity of purpose and aggressive modernization (although Meiji survived an alleged assassination plot by socialists in 1910). But particularly after the First World War, internal tensions driven by the military and militant nationalists set off a renewed power struggle over the direction of the country. Once again, assassinations became a major tactic of influencing policy.

Japan ran through eleven prime ministers in the twelve years between 1921 and 1932. Three ended in assassination or assassination attempts: Hara Takashi in 1921, Hamaguchi Oschi in 1931, and Inukai Tsuyoshi in 1932. A fourth, Yamamoto Gonnohyoe, resigned in shame over security lapses in 1923 after a communist fired into the carriage of Hirohito, then the heir to the imperial throne. That attempt was partly in retaliation for the punishment of the 1910 plotters.

Hara was stabbed to death, and Hamaguchi shot and seriously wounded, both by nationalists enraged at restrictions on the Imperial Japanese Navy in the Washington Naval Treaty. Both attacks occurred at the same train station in Tokyo. Inukai was shot in his own home by a cabal of eleven naval cadets and officers after he restrained the navy in a confrontation with Chinese communists in Shanghai. The plot against Inukai included a plan to murder his guest at the time, Charlie Chaplin, who was attending a sumo-wrestling match with the prime minister’s son. Inukai’s last words to his killers were reportedly, “If I could speak, you would understand,” to which they responded, “Dialogue is useless.” Such is the language of assassination. His killing brought an effective end to civilian oversight of the Japanese military until after the war.

Inukai’s murder came just months after the assassinations of Mitsui chairman Dan Takuma and former finance minister Inoue Junnosuke by an anti-capitalist secret society. Two more former prime ministers, Takahashi Korekiyo and Saito Makoto — the former of whom was then serving as finance minister — were shot to death during an attempted coup in 1936. Violence, and the threat of violence, would haunt the Japanese government for the next nine years.

Murder on TV

Postwar Japan’s history has been a model of stability and peace, but not without a notoriously sensational exception. In October 1960, Inejiro Asanuma, the chairman and face of the Socialist Party and a voice for realigning Japan with Communist China and away from the United States, was assassinated during a televised debate in front of an audience of 1,000 people in Tokyo. Otoya Yamaguchi, a 17-year-old right-wing nationalist and son of a military officer, rushed the stage and ran Asanuma through with a foot-long samurai sword (an attack captured in a famous Pulitzer Prize–winning photograph). Yamaguchi hanged himself in his cell and became an icon of the Japanese far right, while Asanuma’s party never entirely recovered. This touched off a series of assassination plots in the 1960s, although nothing quite as dramatic as what the United States experienced in the same period.

Abe’s legacy as prime minister is such that he will likely be remembered more for his life than for the manner of his death. Let us hope that, unlike past assassinations in Japan, this one does nothing to derail the political direction of the country.