The suspect\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
When Yamagami was ten years old, a young woman knocked on his family\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
Yamagami\u2019s 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\u2019s considerable assets\u2014the construction business, various real-estate holdings, Yamagami\u2019s father\u2019s life insurance\u2014disappeared. There was no food in the house. \u201cMy family fell apart,\u201d 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. \u201cI want to become a pebble,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s situation that he contacted the head of the Unification Church in Nara. The uncle alleged that the donations made by Yamagami\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
Yamagami applied to night school, inspired by his uncle\u2019s advocacy. In his application, he wrote, \u201cI want to become a lawyer who works on consumer fraud and cult issues.\u201d He drafted an e-mail to his younger sister, who had hardly known their mother before she flung herself into the Church: \u201cHang in there.\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0. I\u2019ll protect you.\u201d Yamagami\u2019s mother began to take on debt to keep making donations. She filed for bankruptcy. Yamagami\u2019s 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. \u201cI will never forgive the Church, nor the Japanese people who side with it,\u201d Yamagami tweeted.<\/p>\n
He obsessively followed news about the Church, often retweeting Suzuki, the journalist, who helped run a popular blog called \u201cDaily Cult.\u201d In 2020, Yamagami posted comments to a similar blog, run by a man named Kazuhiro Yonemoto. \u201cThere 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,\u201d Yamagami wrote. \u201cI will risk my life to become the liberator of all those connected to the Unification Church.\u201d He also wrote privately to Yonemoto: \u201cI want a gun so badly.\u201d He couldn\u2019t buy one, so he started to build one at home.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The suspect\u2019s name was Tetsuya Yamagami. He was forty-one years old and lived alone in Nara. He came…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2028,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[176],"tags":[2325,177,179,2324,1786,2326,180,178,2327],"class_list":["post-2027","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-politics","tag-audio","tag-japans-politics","tag-japanese-politics","tag-letter-from-japan","tag-magazine","tag-onecolumnnarrow","tag-politics","tag-politics-of-japan","tag-textbelowcenterfullbleednocontributor"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2027","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2027"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2027\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2028"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2027"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2027"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2027"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}