The trial went on for six weeks. In November, Yamagami’s mother and sister testified from behind a screen, to protect their identities. His mother apologized to Abe’s family—she noted that his ghost was in the courtroom—and to her son. “She spoke directly to Yamagami, using the pet name Tet-chan,” Suzuki recalled. She remained a believer. “She emphasized that everything that had happened to them—even donating so much to put them in poverty—was her fault, not the fault of the Church.”
It was an impulse that I recognized even among some former Unificationists. I had recently interviewed S., a fifty-nine-year-old man who went into debt to make donations and was now seeking damages. (He was later awarded eighty-eight thousand dollars.) Some years had passed since S. and his wife had renounced their faith, but he felt residual loyalty. When Abe was killed, “my initial instinct was to be worried for the Church,” he told me. “But, after we started learning more about Yamagami and his motivation for shooting Prime Minister Abe, I started to reconsider. I started to try to understand.”
Yamagami’s sister’s testimony was, as measured by the number of weeping observers, the emotional apex of the trial. She described how her mother had become cold and unrecognizable, showing up at her office and begging for money. “This person was no longer my mother but a believer wearing my mother’s face,” she said. “I couldn’t turn her away.” Devil, the YouTuber, told me that following the trial was “like checking the answers to a test. A constant stream of ‘Oh, yeah, it was just like that.’ ”
Yamagami took the stand in his own defense. His voice was low; he often stared into space. At one point, he said, “I’m not a bad person.” But the situation with his mother and the Church had felt inescapable. He was overcome by a deep depression. “I should not have lived this long,” he said. Abe had become a receptacle for Yamagami’s despair.
Halfway through the trial, there was little on the record about the connections between the L.D.P. and the Church. “Not enough has been said about why it was Abe,” Suzuki told me. Without that, he worried Yamagami would be sentenced to death, an outcome Suzuki clearly didn’t want. He sent a letter to Yamagami’s lawyers, listing chronological evidence of Abe’s ties to the Moonies and offering himself as a witness. “Abe helped perpetuate the crimes of the Unification Church,” he wrote. “This is not a case of random murder.” I asked Suzuki whether he had blurred the roles of reporter and advocate. He said no; he was just making sure that the facts were out there.
One key fact in the trial dated to 2021, when Abe, who had recently finished his final term as Prime Minister, publicly endorsed the Moonies. The Universal Peace Federation, the charity affiliated with the Church, was hosting a virtual rally, and Hak Ja Han sought video greetings from world leaders. The organization paid Donald Trump, also freshly out of office, half a million dollars for a speech in which he called Han “a tremendous person for her incredible work on behalf of peace.” Abe thanked Han for her “tireless efforts in resolving disputes around the world” and praised the Church’s “focus on family values.” Yamagami had seen Abe’s greeting. Though brief and perfunctory, it swelled into an idée fixe and convinced him that Abe had to be killed.
In mid-December, the court in Nara heard closing arguments. The prosecution, to many observers’ surprise, requested a life sentence for Yamagami instead of the death penalty. Perhaps they gauged the tilt of public opinion; perhaps time had softened the shock of Abe’s death. There was none of the retributive bombast that one might expect in a high-profile murder trial. The prosecutors wrapped up their case by trying to undercut Abe’s links to the Church—what mattered was the fact of the assassination, they said. The defense team framed the Church’s influence as a societal tragedy, and argued for a prison sentence of less than twenty years. A lawyer read a statement on behalf of Akie Abe, who herself attended the trial only once. Her husband’s sudden death, she wrote, “was so overwhelming that my mind went blank and, for a long time, it felt like I was in a dream.” Yamagami kept his eyes downcast. The judge gave him a chance to speak, but he demurred.
The court adjourned for a month. A week before it was set to deliver a verdict and a sentence, Suzuki went to the Osaka Detention House to request a visit with Yamagami. He had tried before and been turned away. This time, Yamagami agreed to see him. Suzuki was escorted up an elevator to a private room. A guard brought in Yamagami, whose hair had grown past his chest. Suzuki felt ill-prepared. “I have had a relationship to him, but I didn’t know what he’d been thinking about me over these three years, or if he was thinking of me at all,” he said. They talked about the trial and how it had been covered in the press. Suzuki recalled that, at one point, Yamagami told him, “What I did pushed you into the limelight.” He encouraged Suzuki to keep going with his investigations. “He was saying, ‘We’re both fighting against this greater thing, the Church,’ ” Suzuki told me. Though Suzuki was careful to condemn the killing, he seemed enraptured by Yamagami. “I was seeing the true side of him,” he said. “He’s a kind man. It made me think even more about how such a kind man could do something terrible.”
Last Wednesday, the chief justice announced Yamagami’s sentence: life in prison. He acknowledged the defendant’s “unfortunate” upbringing, but rejected the argument that it had driven him to kill. At a press conference after the hearing, one juror called Yamagami “a very smart person” who “lived a tragic life as a second-generation believer.” Had it not been for that, he said, “he would have been a great success.” ♦
