The making of Shinzo Abe’s assassin
How family trauma and resentment drove Tetsuya Yamagami to a fatal decision
Tetsuya Yamagami in Nara in July 2022. Earlier that month Yamagami had shot the former prime minister with an improvised shotgun at point-blank range. | JIJI / THE JAPAN TIMES
By Tomoko Otake
Staff writer
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Dec 23, 2025
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Nara –
In late November, as Nara Park was teeming with tourists enjoying the autumn foliage and famed deer herd, the courthouse across the street was engulfed in a different kind of buzz.
The trial of Tetsuya Yamagami, charged with fatally shooting former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe in July 2022, had entered a crucial stage. For the first time since the trial began under tight security on Oct. 28, the defendant opened up about his troubled upbringing, his motivations for the attack and his thoughts on its aftermath.
He has pleaded guilty to murder as well as to lesser charges, including the production of gunpowder and property damage, testifying that a longtime grudge he held against the Unification Church led him to assassinate Abe, whom he regarded as an ally of the religious group.
In broad daylight on July 8, 2022, Yamagami approached Abe, who was stumping for a Liberal Democratic Party candidate, and shot the former prime minister with an improvised shotgun at point-blank range. The pellets struck Abe in his right arm and neck, reaching the arteries under his collarbones. Abe died from blood loss.
“I was trying not to think about anything,” the defendant told the court, asked by a prosecutor what he was thinking when he pulled the trigger.
The shooting capped the long and tortured journey Yamagami had been on since he learned in his mid-teens about his mother’s extreme faith in the Unification Church. There were many turning points along the way, but he said the growing alarm over the church’s ties with Abe, coupled with his own deepening financial crisis, propelled him toward the attack.
The apparent zeal with which he kept looking for assault opportunities, as well as building guns from scratch and training himself for the shooting, both physically and mentally, was striking. The meticulous planning appears to have given him a sense of purpose — or something close to salvation, however distorted — in a life marked by disappointment, disillusionment and despair.
A fractured home
Outside the court, hundreds of people lined up every trial day to apply for a lottery to secure one of about 30 public seats. They included women drawn by his boyish looks captured at the crime scene, dubbed “Yamagami girls” in the media, as well as others who sympathized with his lifelong struggles or suspected a conspiracy behind the case.
In the quiet courtroom, Yamagami, 45, looked far more haggard than at the time of his arrest, with his long hair now streaked with gray and tied back. Each time he entered the courtroom dressed in a sweatshirt and cotton pants, five prison escorts surrounded him before removing his handcuffs and a rope around his waist. When he exited the courtroom, he trudged with his back hunched and his head bobbing with each step.
Former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe speaks at a rally before he was shot during an election event in the city of Nara on July 8, 2022. | Takenobu Nakajima / via REUTERS
The first question the defense team asked during the defendant questioning sessions over five days through early December was his age and his thoughts on living to this day. “I should not have lived this long, I think,” he said. Asked why, he replied, “It led to a result like this, causing a great deal of trouble.”
Yamagami recounted his turbulent family life calmly and matter-of-factly, often pausing to collect his thoughts. Troubles in the family began when he was 4, he said, with the loss of his father to suicide. The father suffered from depression and alcohol addiction.
Recalling his childhood, Yamagami said he was a reserved, well-behaved boy. He said family relationships began to fall apart when he was in junior high school and learned that his mother had joined the Unification Church, now officially called the Family Federation for World Peace and Unification. This came to light after Yamagami’s mother attempted to sell his grandfather’s real estate without his consent so she could donate to the South Korea-based church. The grandfather, Yamagami said, was furious.
At the time, Yamagami lived with his mother, his severely ill elder brother and his younger sister in the grandfather’s house in the city of Nara.
Family arguments over the mother’s church activities, which involved making endless donations to the group, seemed to drive the grandfather over the edge.
“He said he would kill my mother and then kill himself,” Yamagami said.
A courtroom sketch shows Yamagami during his first trial hearing at the Nara District Court on Oct. 28. | JIJI
Yamagami’s relationship with his grandfather was also strained, he said, because his grandfather thought he was not being tough enough on his mother. The grandfather even told Yamagami and his siblings to leave the house, though he never enforced this.
He attended an academically renowned public high school, where he joined the cheering squad and even accompanied the school’s baseball team to the famed Koshien national championship tournament.
Yet he felt like he led a “fake” life in school, unable to share his troubles at home with anybody. In his high school yearbook, Yamagami wrote that his dream was to “become a rock.”
“I felt my life would amount to nothing,” he told the court on Nov. 20.
After graduating from high school, Yamagami thought of becoming a firefighter, thinking the job would toughen him up to become someone who can persevere in the face of adversity. That idea didn’t materialize, however, after he failed a recruitment test.
By that point, Yamagami’s mother had donated ¥100 million to the church, including most of the money the family received in insurance payouts when Yamagami’s father took his own life. The family lived in abject poverty, Yamagami said, and his mother declared bankruptcy in 2002.
He enlisted in the Maritime Self-Defense Force that year, thinking a job in the armed services would give him similar opportunities to those of a firefighter, he said.
Even then, his mother — still an ardent follower of the Unification Church — repeatedly called him asking for money while he was stationed with the MSDF in western Japan. Yamagami said he felt so tormented that he blocked his mother’s calls.
Yamagami’s hopelessness continued. He attempted suicide in 2005, thinking that by taking his own life, his older brother and younger sister could receive insurance money — just as he did after his father's suicide. He was subsequently hospitalized for about a month.
His doctor concluded that Yamagami suffered from schizoid personality disorder, a condition characterized by a lack of interest in social or intimate relationships. The doctor also noted that he harbored suicidal thoughts due to his “extreme family background,” according to medical records.
Seismic events
After his suicide attempt and discharge from the MSDF, Yamagami returned home in Nara to live with his mother, younger sister and his elder brother for a while, before he started living on his own. Between 2007 and 2008, Yamagami sought to reestablish his life, obtaining professional licenses for land surveying, real estate transactions and financial planning in quick succession.
These qualifications, which he thought could help him make a living somehow, are “not that hard to obtain,” he said, an understatement that offered a peek into both his intellect and the values he placed on academic credentials over vocational skills.
His father was a graduate of top-ranked Kyoto University; his mother also graduated from a public university in Osaka. Yamagami himself enrolled in the correspondence course of a law school in around 2012, aspiring to help save victims of religious cults. He dropped out in a year, however, he said, noting that he “gradually lost interest” after hearing about grim career prospects for lawyers.
A sketch shows Yamagami taking the stand at the Nara District Court on Nov. 20. | JIJI
While studying to obtain another property management license, he learned that his mother had lied about the family’s wealth. After his grandfather, who had run a construction company, died when he was a senior in high school, his mother had sold the family’s and his company’s properties, saying the grandfather had unsettled debts. In reality, the mother sold them so she could make even more donations to the church.
The revelation didn’t make Yamagami angry, he said. Instead, he felt like he had “gained his footing at last.”
“I was surprised, but at the same time I thought I finally found a reason for everything that happened,” he said. “I used to wonder why she seemed so happy when our family was so poor. It brightened me to realize that what I’d thought was my responsibility was actually because of my mother’s lies.”
It was around then that the church agreed to return to the family ¥50 million, or about half of the amount donated by his mother, in monthly installments. It’s unclear how exactly such an unusual arrangement was made, but Yamagami’s lawyer uncle helped negotiate a partial refund of the donations. Yamagami said his mother had also consulted with church officials about the family discord.
Yamagami received ¥130,000 per month, about a third of the ¥400,000 the church returned to the family per month, over several years.
But two events drew him back into darkness, eventually propelling him to plot a murder as a way out, he said. One was the suicide in 2015 of his brother, who had lost an eye due to a childhood cancer. Yamagami’s brother was extremely critical of their mother's church activities, often turning violent toward her to vent his frustration, he said.
When Yamagami saw his brother’s body and his blood-soaked T-shirt, he felt as if it “symbolized my own guilt for not saving my brother and pushing him away,” he recounted.
Yamagami said he wailed in grief at his brother’s funeral. He particularly felt responsible for making his brother abandon his wish to apply for an elite university for financial reasons.
His distrust of the Unification Church grew when church officials started conducting a ritual during a wake for his brother, ignoring his request to stop and leave, he said.
The moment when gunfire rang out while Abe was speaking in the city of Nara on July 8, 2022 | Takenobu Nakajima / via REUTERS
Another pivotal incident took place in 2018. While Yamagami was contemplating another suicide attempt so he could leave insurance payouts for his younger sister, his mother told him the refund of her donations had caused his brother’s death, and that the brother “lived happily in heaven.”
“When I was feeling guilty for the death of my brother and even plotting my suicide again, my mother was in a completely different state of mind,” he testified on Nov. 25. “I had a flashback — my previous attempt to leave money (with my own death) and the church’s behavior during my brother’s wake. I found myself yelling at her over the phone like never before, saying, ‘You should die!’”
Yamagami said these events instilled in him an unstoppable desire to attack the Unification Church, including its leader, Han Hak-ja. Getting back at the church became “the meaning of life” for him, he added.
Yoshihide Sakurai, a professor at Hokkaido University and an expert on the sociology of religion, testified as an expert witness for the defense. Based on his scholarly work and interviews with the defendant and his younger sister, he considered Yamagami to be a victim of parental neglect and “religious abuse.”
Sakurai said that many children of people who follow what are referred to new religious movements are often forced to adopt extreme world views and participate in political activities, and as a result suffer from depression well into their 40s and 50s.
He also theorized that, even though Yamagami was not a follower of the church, he was heavily influenced by the church and his mother’s behavior.
“His personality and behavioral patterns are very similar to those of his mother,” he said, citing the mother’s extreme devotion to the church — which was intended to resolve issues with his ill and violent brother — and the defendant’s relentless pursuit of revenge against it on behalf of his brother.
“Their actions were both selfless and beyond limits.”
They also shared the tendency to attach fate-like significance to coincidental events and throw themselves into a goal they had set themselves without fully weighing its consequences, Sakurai added.
Plans of attack
In 2018, Yamagami went to Okayama Prefecture, where a daughter of Unification Church leader Han was visiting for a church event at a large public gymnasium. He had a knife and tear gas with him but got cold feet at the last minute.
“I felt pathetic,” he recalled. “On the surface, I looked exactly like a church follower, paying all the way to go to Okayama and just waiting for her to walk by.”
In 2019, he traveled to Aichi Prefecture, this time with Molotov cocktails he had made, hoping to ambush church leader Han as she entered an event site. He could not find her.
The two failed attempts convinced him that guns would be his best weapon. “I thought I couldn’t carry out an attack unless I keep a certain distance from my target,” he said.
In 2020, he tried to buy a gun from an online dealer and sent about ¥200,000 in cryptocurrency but was swindled out of the money and ridiculed by the dealer, he said. This prompted him to make his own guns.
Yamagami is ushered into a car after allegedly shooting Abe, in the city of Nara on July 8, 2022. | Takenobu Nakajima / via REUTERS
He also mentally prepared himself for the attack. One of the books he kept in his apartment was a translated edition of Dave Grossman’s “On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society.” The 1995 book details how soldiers in combat overcome their innate reluctance to kill people.
From December 2020, he started making pipe guns and gunpowder with materials he bought online and in hardware stores, referring to overseas videos and video games themed on DIY weapons. He built a total of 10 guns, experimenting with different lengths and numbers of barrels ranging from one to nine. He rented an apartment in the city of Nara just for this purpose, toiling away mostly on weekends.
From December 2021 through June 2022, he said he also made over 10 trips to the mountains in Nara, test-firing his guns and confirming that they could penetrate veneer plywood that is 2 to 3 centimeters thick. Yamagami kept meticulous notes and smartphone videos of the tests.
The prosecutors played the video clips and displayed some of the pipe guns seized from his apartment in front of the nine judges, including six lay members, to demonstrate the dangerous and premeditated nature of the attack.
‘A sense of crisis’
Yamagami said he had loosely recognized Abe’s connection to the church since 2006, when the politician, then the chief cabinet secretary, sent a congratulatory telegram to the group. But it was Abe’s 2021 video message to Universal Peace Federation, a church-affiliated group, that made the defendant feel “despair and a sense of crisis,” he said.
“My first thought was, at least he had the decency not to appear (in a church video) while he was a sitting prime minister,” he said.
“Now that he was no longer prime minister, there’s nothing to stop him from appearing in church videos, and such practices would continue, I thought. Since he served so long as prime minister, I thought this would give the group a stamp of approval in society.... For someone victimized by the group, this was extremely upsetting and unacceptable.”
As Yamagami was making guns in his Nara apartment, Unification Church leaders remained his primary target. But amid COVID-19 travel restrictions, senior church figures were not making trips to Japan.
Yamagami shifted his target to Abe, thinking that the former prime minister was “at the heart of ties between the Unification Church and politics.” It was just a few days before July 8, 2022. By then, Yamagami was at the point of no return.
The Tokyo headquarters of the Family Federation for World Peace and Unification, more commonly known as the Unification Church, in 2022 | REUTERS
“I had spent so much money and time making weapons and was already at a financial breaking point,” Yamagami testified, when asked by presiding Judge Shinichi Tanaka if he had ever thought of holding back his plan. “If I quit after that, what would all of it have been for? I absolutely wanted to avoid suffering any further defeats at the hands of the Unification Church, so the thought of backing out never crossed my mind.”
Throughout the trial, prosecutors sought to portray Yamagami as a man with a big ego and poor interpersonal skills, who directed his sense of failures at building an ideal life, his feelings of frustration and distrust of others at the religious group and Abe.
Hisashi Wada, a doctor at Osaka Red Cross Hospital who performed a psychiatric evaluation of the defendant, appeared as an expert witness for the prosecution. He reinforced the prosecution’s view that financial problems hastened Yamagami’s decision to switch his target to Abe.
Yamagami, who was registered with about 20 temp agencies and frequently changed jobs, quit his last job in June 2022. The possibility of bankruptcy loomed as he had racked up more than ¥2 million in debt, mostly in his quest to build guns.
Wada testified that Yamagami told the doctor that he couldn’t go broke because if he did, his mother “would cry with joy,” reasoning that his opposition to the church caused his bankruptcy.
“By then, he had no prospect of recovering economically,” Wada said. “The thought of how his mother would react if he declared bankruptcy was intolerable to him, and that may have led to the attack.”
Political ties
The prosecution also aimed to minimize the influence of Abe’s links to the Unification Church, contending that the extreme faith in the group by Yamagami’s mother and the misery it inflicted on her children “had nothing to do with the victim” — and thus provided no grounds for leniency.
During the questioning of Yamagami, prosecutors drew testimony from him saying that his real target was church leaders, and that an attack on the influential politician expressing support for the religious group was a digression from his real goal.
Eito Suzuki, a journalist who has investigated the Unification Church and religious cults for 20 years and covered every session of Yamagami’s trial, disputes the view that Abe was a coincidental victim.
Suzuki has written about how the church courted political elites, including by striking a “deal” in 2013 with Abe, then prime minister, through which the group started providing organized election support for LDP candidates.
Eito Suzuki, a journalist who has investigated the Unification Church and religious cults for 20 years and covered every session of Yamagami’s trial, disputes the view that Abe was a hapless, coincidental victim. | Tomoko Otake
In 2022, the Asahi Shimbun published a photo of Abe posing with top church officials in Japan at the LDP meeting room in June 2013, ahead of the Upper House election the following month.
Yamagami told the court that he had learned about their ties mostly by reading Suzuki’s articles. He also sent direct messages to the journalist via Twitter, now X, inquiring about the church events.
“Yamagami probably spoke honestly when he said targeting Abe would not serve his main goal,” Suzuki said. “But then, was Abe killed by Yamagami’s misunderstanding, merely because Abe was associating with the church, as he would with any others as a politician? That was not the truth. Abe did overstep his ethical boundaries.
“Yamagami probably acted out of the sense of crisis, not an indignation against Abe as an individual.”
On July 7, 2022, Yamagami traveled to Okayama with a plan to shoot Abe during a rally for an Upper House election candidate. But he couldn’t get close to Abe and missed his chance.
On his way back to Nara, he checked the LDP website and learned that Abe would be in the city the following day to make a speech for another candidate. “I had never thought Abe would come to Nara the day after I failed to attack him,” he said. “It didn’t seem like a mere coincidence.”
On July 8, he finally carried out the attack. He seized a moment when a member of the security detail positioned behind Abe moved to the side.
“This, too, seemed like something beyond coincidence,” he recalled.
The assassination of Abe, condemned as an affront to political speech, was a wake-up call for Japan regarding religion and politics. A new law has been legislated to ban religious entities from soliciting excessive donations, while the LDP has pledged to sever ties with the group. In March, the Tokyo District Court also stripped the church of its tax-exempt status as a religious corporation.
Yamagami said he hadn’t anticipated this turn of events, adding he was “grateful” for them.
Conflicting emotions
The saga leaves one key question unanswered: Why did he target Abe, a distant figure in his life, instead of the person who continued to torment him — his mother?
Yamagami said during the trial that he had considered shooting her while test-firing his weapons in the mountains of Nara, but stopped short of acting on the impulse, as his ultimate target was the church itself.
“If I attacked her and it was found out, I would have lost my chance to attack senior leaders of the church,” he said. “Her behavior was driven by the church’s doctrine, not her personal beliefs.”
A mourner offers flowers next to a picture of Abe at the Liberal Democratic Party headquarters in Tokyo in July 2022. | REUTERS
Yamagami’s feelings toward his mother seem conflicted. He considered his nutritionist mother “not a bad person” but found her devotion to the church “unfathomable.”
When his mother appeared in court as a defense witness in mid-November, she apologized profusely for her son’s actions. But she also said she hoped to keep her faith in the church.
The mother even tried to talk to him directly, addressing him by his nickname Tecchan despite calls by a judge to stop. Yamagami, separated from her by a partition, didn’t respond.
Later, Yamagami acknowledged that his attack “put her in an extremely hard position.” But he also said, somewhat distantly, that she hasn’t changed at all, adding: “She does things very much at her own pace.”
“I hope she will live quietly somewhere,” he said.
Face to face
On Dec. 3, just as the court convened, several journalists bolted from their seats and headed to the door to report the breaking news: Akie Abe, the widow of the former prime minister, had appeared at the trial for the first time. Dressed in a black suit, she sat behind the prosecution team.
Yamagami, who took the stand, bowed to her, and Abe nodded. Participating as a victim’s kin, she posed no questions, quietly observing the proceedings the entire day.
Yamagami had a chance to show remorse and apologize to the widow directly in court. He did not. He said he would speak his mind the following day, the last day of questioning.
Abe did not return to court, though she could have under the victim participation system.
Akie Abe wipes away tears during the state funeral for her husband in Tokyo on Sept. 27, 2022. | Pool / via REUTERS
Yamagami escorted by a police officer in the city of Nara in July 2022 | ASAHI SHIMBUN / VIA GETTY IMAGES
Last Thursday, prosecutors demanded that Yamagami be sentenced to life in prison, amid speculation they may seek the death penalty. Yamagami did not show remorse in Thursday's closing session, when he was given time to make a final plea. He said he had nothing to say. A ruling at the Nara District Court is set for Jan. 21.
Yet there was one instance during the trial when Yamagami did show remorse. Toward the end of the five-day questioning, defense lawyer Kohei Matsumoto asked the defendant: “Because of your actions, a life has been taken. Do you have anything you wish to say?”
“I have no resentment against Akie Abe and Abe’s family members,” he answered, his voice raspy and trembling. “There is no question that I caused them pain. I’ve lost family members myself, so there is no excuse. I’m deeply sorry for what I did.”
Still, he showed ambivalence when a judge later asked if there was anything that could have stopped him from killing the former prime minister.
"I was unable to completely change my line of thinking,” he said. “Because former Prime Minister Abe was not completely without ties to the Unification Church.”
If you or someone you know is in crisis and needs help, resources are available. In case of an emergency in Japan, please call 119 for immediate assistance. The TELL Lifeline is available for those who need free and anonymous counseling at 0800-300-8355. For those in other countries, visit International Suicide Hotlines for a detailed list of resources and assistance.
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