Shinzo Abe assassinated: Inukai Tsuyoshi, the last Japan PM who was shot dead 90 yrs ago

Japan, where violent crimes are rare, and gun crime is negligible, on June 8, witnessed a shocking incident. Longest-serving Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe was assassinated. He was shot with an improvised shotgun minutes after he started a stump speech in Nara Friday morning.

Abe, who stepped down from the top post in 2020 due to his health issues, was still a huge personality for Japanese people as well as world leaders.

Police present at the shooting spot in Nara arrested Tetsuya Yamagami, a former member of Japan's navy, on suspicion of murder. Police said that a homemade gun was confiscated from him and added that they seized similar weapons and his computer when they raided his one-room apartment.

It should be mentioned that Abe is not the first prime minister of Japan, who has been assassinated.

In 1921, Takashi Hara, who set up Japan's full-fledged party Cabinet system and was called the "commoner prime minister", was murdered. He was stabbed to death by a railway worker.

In 1930, a gunman attacked then Prime Minister Hamaguchi Osachi. Osachi initially survived the assassination attempt, but died nine months later due to a bacterial infection in his unhealed wounds.

In 1932, Prime Minister Tsuyoshi Inukai was assassinated by eleven junior Navy officers in the Prime Minister's residence in Tokyo. The original plan of the insurgents was to kill Charlie Chaplin, who was in Japan at that time, to provoke war with the United States. However, the plan failed as Chaplin was watching a sumo wrestling contest with Inukai's son and thus escaped. This was the last assassination of a Prime Minister in Japan.

Shinzo Abe's grandfather Prime Minister Nobusuke Kisi was also stabbed in 1960, leaving him severely injured but he survived. In the same year, the head of the Japan Socialist Party (JSP) was fatally stabbed by a 17-year-old right-wing extremist while he was making a speech.