Tokyo Letter: Opposition grows to state funeral for Shinzo Abe

Burying political leaders with all the pomp and ceremony that only tax money can provide is often divisive. Many Irish people had no taste for footing the bill for the funeral of Charlie Haughey in 2006, despite his three stints as taoiseach. Few turned up to watch his tricolour-draped coffin being lowered into a grave in St Fintan’s Cemetery.

Still, the scale of opposition to a state funeral for Shinzo Abe may surprise some. After all, Abe held the record as Japan’s longest-serving prime minister before being murdered on July 8TH while campaigning ahead of an election. The government says it will lay him to rest on September 27th in front of 6,400 official guests from around the world, at a cost of about $12m.

Polls suggest most Japanese are uneasy with that decision. The liberal Mainichi newspaper claimed this week that 53 per cent oppose the state funeral. Even media outlets that once backed Abe struggle to make the case that he is universally popular, and some appear to suggest he was widely distrusted (Nagasaki Shimbun, a regional newspaper, puts opposition to the funeral at 75 per cent).

Thousands demonstrated against the funeral in front of Japan’s parliament on August 31st. A group of lawyers and scholars has filed an injunction to block the event, saying it is wrong to force the public to join in collectively mourning Abe. The Japan Democratic Lawyers Association says a state funeral would in effect anoint Abe’s controversial legacy with a state blessing.

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Many have cited the miasma of corruption that had settled around Abe by the time he quit in 2020. The most serious scandal under his tenure was the suicide of a finance ministry official who had been ordered to falsify documents, apparently to protect Abe. The documents related to the knockdown sale of public land to a company that was building a primary school to propagate right-wing ideas.

But uppermost in the public mind is a string of revelations that have emerged since Abe’s death about his ties to the far-right Unification Church, better known as the Moonies. Abe’s presumed killer, Tetsuya Yamagami apparently held Abe responsible for his family’s impoverishment after his mother emptied the family coffers of more than €1 million in service to the Moonies. Yamagami’s father and brother committed suicide.

Despite what might be seen as eccentric views (founder Moon Son Myung claimed to have received his commission — aged 16 — directly from Jesus; their main claim to fame was hosting mass weddings between strangers), the South Korean church and its affiliates had a web of connections to politicians in Japan, united in their anti-communist beliefs and pro-family values.

A survey by the Asahi Shimbun newspaper last week claimed that 150 Diet members, 290 prefectural assembly members and seven governors have admitted having “contact with or ties to” the Unification Church, most of them in Abe’s Liberal Democratic Party (LDP). Abe’s grandfather, Nobusuke Kishi, was an associate of Moon and helped broker their entry into Japan in the 1960s. Abe himself spoke in support of the church’s offshoot, Universal Peace Federation.

While these ties are poorly grasped — politicians seem to have relied on the church’s followers to harvest votes and help as volunteers — its acquisitiveness looks all too clear to millions of Japanese. According to the National Network of Lawyers Against Spiritual Sales, the Moonies funnelled up to 70 billion yen (more than $500 million) a year from gullible Japanese followers like Mrs Yamagami to South Korea, and from there to various right-wing causes in America.

Politicians — such as Abe — who had any hand in enabling the church have now come under renewed suspicion. But for many, the idea of state funerals itself carry unwanted overtones of the authoritarian, pre-second World War era, when they were bestowed on loyal subjects of the empire by the Japanese emperor. There has only been one since 1945 — for former prime minister Shigeru Yoshida in 1967 — and that too was deeply controversial.

Abe’s critics say the funeral is not just an attempt to paper over his contested legacy, but also to strengthen the authoritarian tendencies that marked his premiership. None of this is likely to stop the funeral going ahead in a few weeks’ time, but it is causing a great deal of hand-wringing in a country still struggling to fully grasp exactly what Abe left behind.