Abe’s assassination stunned a country known for strict gun laws and low violent crime rates, and invited scrutiny of a religious organisation.
The Unification Church was established in South Korea in 1954, with its members nicknamed “Moonies” after its founder Sun Myung Moon. Former prime minister Abe, he could draw public attention to the Church and fuel public criticism of it,” a prosecutor told the court in October.
In a plea for leniency, Yamagami’s defense team stressed his upbringing had been mired in “religious abuse” stemming from his mother’s extreme faith in the Unification Church.
In despair after the suicide of her husband, and with her other son gravely ill, Yamagami’s mother poured all her assets into the church to “salvage” her family, Yamagami’s lawyer said, adding that her donations eventually snowballed to around 100 million yen ($1 million at the time).
Yamagami was forced to give up pursuing higher education. In 2005, he attempted to take his own life before his brother died by suicide.
Investigations after Abe’s murder led to cascading revelations about close ties between the church and many conservative lawmakers in the ruling Liberal Democratic Party, prompting four ministers to resign.
In 2020, Yamagami began handcrafting a lethal firearm, a process that involved meticulous test-firing sessions in a remote mountainous area.
This pointed to the highly “premeditated” nature of his attack on Abe, prosecutors said.
The assassination was also a wake-up call for a nation which has some of the world’s strictest gun controls.
Gun violence is so rare in Japan that security officials at the scene failed to immediately identify the sound made by the first shot, and came to Abe’s rescue too late, a police report after the attack said.
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