The suspect’s name was Tetsuya Yamagami. He was forty-one years old and lived alone in Nara. He came from a well-off family, but his early childhood had been marred by tragedy: his father, a construction manager who suffered from alcoholism and depression, died by suicide; his older brother went partially blind from cancer during elementary school.
When Yamagami was ten years old, a young woman knocked on his family’s door. His mother answered, and the woman offered to examine her family tree to locate ancestral sources of misfortune. She was, as it turned out, a follower of Sun Myung Moon, the Korean man who had founded the Unification Church to promote his theological mix of Christian Messianism, Cold War anti-Communism, pro-natalism, and self-adulation. The Church was only a few decades old, but it had already amassed tens of thousands of adherents, who were often referred to as Moonies.
Yamagami’s mother soon immersed herself in Church activities. She made large donations, believing that the money would save her extended lineage, and possibly the world, from the forces of evil. The family’s considerable assets—the construction business, various real-estate holdings, Yamagami’s father’s life insurance—disappeared. There was no food in the house. “My family fell apart,” Yamagami later wrote. He shrank into himself, to the point of vanishing. His online username was silent hill 333. In his high-school yearbook, he was asked about his desires for the future. “I want to become a pebble,” he said.
At twenty-four, Yamagami drank an industrial solvent in an attempt to kill himself. He was hospitalized, and his mother, who had gone to Korea on a forty-day Church retreat, refused to come home early to see him. He was visited instead by his uncle, a lawyer who was so distressed by the family’s situation that he contacted the head of the Unification Church in Nara. The uncle alleged that the donations made by Yamagami’s mother, which by then totalled seven hundred thousand dollars, had been coerced. The Nara official agreed to return half that amount to the family, in installments, apparently keen to avoid a lawsuit.
Yamagami applied to night school, inspired by his uncle’s advocacy. In his application, he wrote, “I want to become a lawyer who works on consumer fraud and cult issues.” He drafted an e-mail to his younger sister, who had hardly known their mother before she flung herself into the Church: “Hang in there. . . . I’ll protect you.” Yamagami’s mother began to take on debt to keep making donations. She filed for bankruptcy. Yamagami’s brother pleaded with her to leave the religion and fought with her endlessly, sometimes beating her. The brother died by suicide in 2015, in his mid-thirties. “I will never forgive the Church, nor the Japanese people who side with it,” Yamagami tweeted.
He obsessively followed news about the Church, often retweeting Suzuki, the journalist, who helped run a popular blog called “Daily Cult.” In 2020, Yamagami posted comments to a similar blog, run by a man named Kazuhiro Yonemoto. “There is no other society in this world that approves of a group that encourages deceiving, robbing, and making family members fight, and even takes pleasure in it,” Yamagami wrote. “I will risk my life to become the liberator of all those connected to the Unification Church.” He also wrote privately to Yonemoto: “I want a gun so badly.” He couldn’t buy one, so he started to build one at home.