Funniest death?
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Is “too soon” not a thing anymore, I wonder?
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Celebrating the death of guy who celebrated the killers of your family is absolutely understandable.
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This guy?
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Christopher Wong actually. https://twitter.com/Itmechr3
Wong doesn’t care for Abe’s grandpa either.
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Fair enough, I guess. But damn, this happened like three days ago. My country is still in mourning.
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A few more details have trickled in from the police about Tetsuya Yamagami.
Evidently, he started thinking about killing a leader in the Unification Church last summer. However, he found that it would be difficult to get close to church leadership. When he saw that Shinzo Abe had sent a video message to the UPF (Universal Peace Federation) conference, he took this to mean that Abe was intimately associated with the Unification Church and so decided to kill Abe in the fall of last year.
He initially planned to assassinate Abe with a bomb, but decided against it, as he wanted to avoid collateral damage. And so, he decided to make a homemade gun, which he completed in March.
Again, this is the possibly unreliable word of Yamagami himself as filtered through police statements and unnamed sources, so we should take it all with a grain of salt.
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As noted above, one of the many front organisations used by the cult to launder the relationship between it and the politicians they buy with honoraria, prizes, etc.
Perhaps not. Like conservative politicians around the globe, he did make it easier for them to operate their grift in his country. From the my link to the 2006 article above:
In a Unification Church’s magazine, Kajikuri Gentaro, the former director of a Unification Church’s front organization “International Federation for Victory over Communism” said that he worked with Kishi Nobusuke, Abe’s grandfather and former prime minister, to establish an independent Japanese constitution and the enactment of an anti-espionage law. Kajikuri also said that he met Abe Shintato, Abe’s father and former foreign minister, every month to explain the “unification movement.”
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The press probably will question the UPF, only to be told to ask the Unification Church.
Also, what kind of organization has no records from 20 years ago and nobody left who was there then?
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If anyone tries to travel back the UPF’s funding, it will lead to a rat’s nest of shell corporations and shady non-profits that might terminate in the family’s industrial conglomerate.
My assumption is that they destroy the financial records after seven years or whatever the standard is in Japan so they can have plausible deniability regarding exact amounts in situations like this or in lawsuits. My assumption is also that – like American evangelical megachurches and the Cult of $cientology – they keep a very detailed and private CRM record of every mark that includes code phrases for the frequencies and amounts of donations/tithes as well as tracking info on church attendance and event participation.
These scumbags have had decades to refine their racket.
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Sigh. The fuckin Matamoras moonies were over there at the time stirring up shit
The info in the following tweets is not 100% confirmed but if it is, i’m worried about these yahoos doing something near my hometown
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The whole country? In mourning for a quasi-fascist? And you’re mourning along with everyone else there? We’re supposed to bow our heads in quiet respect for that?
I’ve been appreciating the updates, but come on now.
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I could believe shock.
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Perhaps shock is a better word.
I am not sad that Abe is dead, but I am profoundly saddened that something like this could happen. And I am sad about what this incident portends for Japan’s future.
It is not my intention to defend Abe’s record (and there is a lot there that is absolutely indefensible), but to point out that these kinds of political assassinations are always ugly and never funny.
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Rumors about Yamagami being a member of the Sanctuary Church have been going around since Sunday. The press even asked the Unification Church if that was the case, to which the church replied that they have no connection with the Sanctuary Church and so wouldn’t know.
I have yet to see any news outlets mention the Sanctuary Church, so this remains undetermined, but those photos do look like pretty compelling evidence.
ETA: OMG! I was so busy looking at the Unification Church that I (and apparently a lot of the media) had completely overlooked the Sanctuary Church. They actually put out a press release on July 9 or 10 (it really was overlooked to the point where it is not even clear when it appeared on their website), and the language is a lot more combative than what is coming out of the Unification Church. It consists of four points. (Note: I am paraphrasing rather than translating.)
(1) The Sanctuary Church of Japan denies any involvement with Tetsuya Yamagami and claims to have no record of any contact with him. The church demands that the media retract these baseless assumptions, conjecture and malicious manipulation of public opinion.
(2) The Sanctuary Church of Japan has never received a single yen in donations from Yamagami’s mother or anyone else.
(3) Although we respected Abe and supported many of his positions, his involvement with the Church was limited to a congratulatory telegram, which he sent on the occasion of the founding of our Japan branch on March 1, 2015. The church denies that Abe ever attended any church event.
(4) The media’s prejudicial reporting on the church and its relationship with guns has led to many misunderstandings. The church is based in America and so believes that the right to bear arms is very important in America. The church abides by the Constitution and Law of Japan and does not engage in any illegal activity. The church demands retraction and apology for all malicious claims that would attempt to tie our church to Tetsuya Yamagami on the basis of guns.
Again, the above four points are a paraphrasing of the words of the Sanctuary Church.
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Holy (almost literally) shit (very literally).
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This morning’s newspapers are flooded with stories about the Unification Church.
Late last night (after I was in bed), the National Network of Lawyers Against Spiritual Sales (an advocacy group for victims of religious scams) held a press conference calling out the lies of the Unification Church. Evidently, in just the past 5 years, the Unification Church has scammed over 5 Billion JPY (40M USD) from believers. And that’s just the people who realized that they were getting scammed and consulted with the advocacy group. And (surprise, surprise) the church does in fact demand donations to the point of sucking people dry. The news is also full of stories from people who got scammed.
Meanwhile, I am not seeing much about the Sanctuary Church yet, but the rumor mill is saying that Tetsuya Yamagami probably had help from somewhere to be able to make a working homemade gun. He certainly does not seem to have learned how to do that from his training in the Maritime Self Defense Force.
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Sources with ties to the Yamagami Family have revealed that Tetsuya Yamagami’s mother donated over 100M JPY (750K USD) to the Unification Church, including the proceeds from selling the family home and land that the family had inherited from Yamagami’s grandfather.
Yamagami seems to have gone into more depth with (and shifted) his statements to police, who now know that his original target was actually Hak Ja Han (the current leader of the church), who last visited Japan in 2019. Yamagami had planned to use Molotov cocktails to kill Han at a church event in Aichi Prefecture, but gave up after being unable to gain entry to the venue. The pandemic made future visits to Japan uncertain, and so he gave up on killing Han and turned his focus to Abe.
This whole incident has shed a light on the sordid yet murky relationship between many Japanese politicians and the Unification Church, which many commentators are saying has prevented Japanese authorities from cracking down on the church in the past. For instance, here is a photograph of Nobusuke Kishi shaking hands with none other than Sun Myung Moon himself.
I can only hope that this incident will prompt prosecutors to take a hardline against politically active cultish religions in Japan (of which there are many) as they did against Aum Shinrikyo in the wake of the Tokyo Sarin Gas Attacks. These kinds of sketchy religions have long had a cozy relationship with Japanese politics; it’s been kept out of the spotlight, but has always been kind of an open secret. As I mentioned before, Komeito (the LDP’s longtime coalition partner) is literally the political wing of the sketchy Buddhist sect Soka Gakkai. The assassination of Shinzo Abe has shed new light on all of this, and more information is coming out every day. If anything good is to come of this, it will have to be getting these cults out of Japanese politics once and for all.
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