Tetsuya Yamagami

Personal life

Yamagami was born on 10 September 1980 in Mie Prefecture to affluent parents who ran a local construction business. Yamagami's family moved to Higashiosaka. Described as quiet and reserved in high school, he nonetheless joined the cheerleading team, which he described as a "manly" endeavor to a friend. Yamagami had been struggling since childhood with the Unification Church (UC), of which his mother had become a member since 1991. After the death of his maternal grandfather, his mother inherited ownership of the family properties and family business. She had donated more than 100 million yen to the UC and declared bankruptcy in 2002 when Yamagami was 21 years old.

Yamagami graduated from Nara Prefectural Koriyama Senior High School in 1998, with plans of becoming a firefighter, but was unable to pass a required test due to his near-sightedness. Yamagami did not attend university due to his mother's insistence on donation to find salvation for his ill and suicidal older brother,

Relatives Father and older brother Yamagami's father, Nakauchi Yamagami (山上中内, Yamagami Nakauchi), was born in 1947, and he and his older brother were raised by their mother. Nakauchi graduated from Kyoto University's faculty of engineering in 1970. He committed suicide in Higashiosaka by jumping from a twelve story apartment building on December 31, 1984 when Yamagami was four years old and Nakauchi was 37 when he died. and had a longtime struggle with lymphoma which led to him losing sight in one eye, and was unable to afford medical treatment. He committed suicide by jumping from a high location on November 8, 2015 when Yamagami was thirty five years old and their younger sister, Koyama Yamagami, was thirty years old; he was 36 at the time of his death.

Mother Yamagami's mother Yoko Ako (阿古陽子, Ako Yoko) and younger sister Koyama Yamagami (山上小山, Yamagami Koyama) initially declined media interviews. In her testimony during the first-instance trial of her younger son, Yamagami's mother stated that before her husband's death, for finding solace to distract herself from her husband's alcoholic addiction, she had already been involved in religious activities and making donations for 500 thousand yen. The monetary offering was opposed by her husband and other family members which frustrated her. She declared bankruptcy in 2002 when Yamagami was 21,

A selection of text messages Yamagami sent to his mother in 2012 while she traveled to South Korea (home of the UC headquarters) were disclosed in court. The messages indicated a strong resentment towards her, with Yamagami writing "It is absurd that you pretend to be a normal parent", "Maybe I should kill you and take the insurance money", and "I will disgrace you and make you regret it." Since his arrest, Yamagami has refused all contact with his mother, declining her requests for visitation at the detention facility, while continuing to read and acknowledge letters from supporters.

Shortly before Yamagami's first-instance trial in October 2025, his mother gave an in-depth interview to the Japan News Network, in which she stated that her faith in the UC and its teachings has only grown stronger since the assassination, while acknowledging that she had made excessive donations in the past. However, she rejected the view that her donations were the reason her son shot Abe, instead attributing the incident to the "[lack of] familial love". She blamed herself over the assassination and said, "If I had not been a mother, things would not have turned out like this." On November 13, she was called by Yamagami's defense team as a witness, where she apologized over his actions. Her physical appearance was concealed in court.

Paternal uncle Yamagami's paternal uncle, (January 27, 1945), is the older brother of Yamagami's father, and has provided many accounts about Yamagami's family. Tōichirō was 77 years old when Abe was assassinated. Originally working in the construction contractor industry, he obtained an attorney's licence and started his own legal consulting firm in Osaka. Despite being a lawyer himself, he appointed a team of defense attorneys to represent Yamagami during his criminal proceedings. After Yamagami's father's death by suicide on December 31, 1984, he had been providing financial aid to Yamagami's family for about 20 million yen , up until 2020 when Japan was hit by the COVID-19 pandemic. Yamagami's mother Yoko Ako asked her brother-in-law Tōichirō Yamagami for money to donate to the Unification Church while neglecting her children and Tōichirō Yamagami threw a tea on Yoko Ako and drove her away in a fit of rage. In February 2005, while in the military, In an investigation report written by the JMSDF, Yamagami stated that his "life had been ruined by the Unification Church", and that his "brother and sister are in need", wanting to "help them by giving them my life insurance". He was discharged from the JMSDF in August 2005 as a quartermaster Career after the navy After the JMSDF, Yamagami worked for at least 10 different companies for 17 years until the assassination. In December 2006, he worked in a surveying company as a part-timer, and quit in June 2007. He remained unemployed for 2 years and, during that period, he obtained the licences of and real estate notary. Since then he mostly took short-term part-time jobs or dispatched labour and quit swiftly for personal reasons, usually after about half a year of employment. The longest job he remained at lasted about one and a half years. There, he was described as quiet. He quit in May 2022 after claiming that he was "feeling unwell". After that, Yamagami briefly worked under another temporary staffing firm in Osaka Prefecture until he resigned in early June 2022.

Criminal proceedings

Yamagami was arrested at the scene of the assassination on suspicion of attempted murder by the Nara Prefectural Police; the charge was upgraded to murder after Abe was pronounced dead. Yamagami was transferred to the Nara Nishi Police Station upon his arrest. He was described as being calm and having made no attempts to flee. Before any formal charges were brought against Yamagami, he was held at the Osaka Detention House and had been psychiatrically evaluated to determine if he was mentally competent to be indicted.

On 24 December 2022, the Nara District Prosecutor's Office determined that Yamagami was competent enough to stand trial on the murder charge, based on factors including the capability of making the firearm allegedly used in the assassination. On 10 January 2023, Yamagami was transferred back to Nara Nishi Police Station to continue his detainment. An additional charge against Yamagami of violating the Firearm and Sword Possession Control Law was added by the Prosecutor's Office. Three days later, Yamagami was formally charged with Abe's murder.

On 30 March 2023, the prosecutor's office added two more criminal charges, namely violations of and property damage, bringing the total charges against Yamagami to four. The charge related to the was dismissed because the prosecutors determined that there was insufficient evidence to support the allegation. On 28 October 2025, the trial against Yamagami began in Nara. Yamagami admitted to killing Abe during the first hearing, and his lawyer asked for any punishment to be automatically reduced because Yamagami's handmade gun did not fall under the criteria of the Firearms and Swords Control Act. On 21 January 2026, Yamagami was sentenced to life imprisonment.

Psychiatric evaluation While psychiatric assessment of a criminal suspect in Japan usually takes about three months, Yamagami's nearly half-year-long assessment is considered unusual. A journalist speculated that the prosecutors were waiting for public sentiment over the assassination to quiet down, due to the aftermath brought by the incident as well as sympathy and admiration towards Yamagami.

Sentencing guidelines

Regarding the possible sentence should Yamagami be convicted of murder, Japanese media cited a similar case in 2007, in which former gang leader Tetsuya Shiroo was convicted of murdering Iccho Itoh during the latter's campaign for re-election as the mayor of Nagasaki City. Shiroo was sentenced to death during the first trial in Nagasaki District Court on the grounds of "strong antisocial behavior which denies the foundation of democracy". This was overturned and reduced to life imprisonment in a second trial in Fukuoka High Court and Supreme Court, as the judges preferred to be cautious of seeking capital punishment for a murder conviction which involved a single fatality.

Motive Yamagami told investigators that his motive had been personal rather than political. After his mother joined the Unification Church in August 1991, she had given the church about 100 million yen , a parcel of land she had inherited from her father, and the house where she lived with her three children; she subsequently declared bankruptcy in 2002. She had continued donating to the church following the bankruptcy. Yamagami's uncle recalled being contacted by Yamagami and his siblings to complain that they had no food at home, and that electricity and rent payments were often overdue, prompting the uncle to deliver meals and money for living expenses. Researching the church's connections to Abe in the months before the attack, he believed the former prime minister Abe and his maternal grandfather, former prime minister Nobusuke Kishi, had an involvement in spreading the church's influence in Japan. In a letter sent to journalist on 7 July, the day before the incident, Yamagami introduced himself as "Mada Tari-nai" (, ), a regular commenter under that handle on Yonemoto's blog posts, and stressed that he "had spent [much time] trying to obtain guns". The letter was sent from Okayama and did not mention the name of the sender, but a "statement of mutual agreement" between Yamagami's family and the Unification Church was enclosed. He also noted that killing Hak Ja Han, the leader of the Unification Church, or her daughter, would not achieve his goal of getting the Unification Church dissolved. Yonemoto found the letter in his home mailbox on 13 July, five days after the assassination. A draft copy of the letter was found on Yamagami's computer.

Yonemoto, who never had met Yamagami before, said: "I think he probably had no one to talk to and wanted to express his feelings to someone. He may have thought I was his friend because I operate the blog he posted on. I understand the suffering of believers' children. But I wish he had consulted with me directly before going that far." Yonemoto initially refused to hand the letter over to police, and it was later seized. Yamagami stated that his Twitter account was @333_hill, a reference to the video game franchise Silent Hill, in his letter to Yonemoto. The account was made in October 2019, with Hak Ja Han scheduled to visit Aichi Prefecture the same month.

Yamagami posted on Twitter that he was "willing to die to liberate every person involved in the Unification Church", and that he had "no concern about what will happen to the Abe administration as a result". Yamagami's Twitter account was suspended from 19 July due to an unspecified violation of Twitter's company policies. Another Twitter account belonging to Yamagami was suspended in 2019 for violating Twitter's policies on "abusive language, threatening, or discriminatory language or behavior".

A text mining analysis of Yamagami's tweets indicated that he was very political because of the Unification Church's involvement in Yamagami's family. The most discussed topics among his tweets were "North/South Korea", followed by "gender inequality", "left wingers/liberalism", and "the constitution/reinterpretation of self-defense". However, when it came to his emotional reactions to each topic, his hatred was championed by the "Unification Church", far away from his "family", then "North/South Korea", and "Shinzo Abe".

In May 2023, it was revealed that Yamagami also sent two private messages on Twitter to the anti-cult journalist Eito Suzuki nine days before the assassination. The messages went unnoticed by Suzuki before Yamagami's account was suspended, but the two men were able to re-establish communication using letters delivered by Yamagami's lawyers. Yamagami claimed that the messages were about him being a regular reader of Suzuki's writing, and a question about an important figure from the UC who would attend a 10 July 2022 ceremony held in Urawa-ku, Saitama. Suzuki deduced that that person was the then second-in-command of the UC, Yun Young-ho .

Planning Yamagami said that his initial plan was to assassinate a high-ranking official of the Unification Church, but later decided to target Abe instead. From around the time his mother went bankrupt, Yamagami wandered around the Unification Church building carrying a knife, looking for an opportunity to kill Hak Ja Han. He planned to kill Han with a Molotov cocktail when she visited Aichi Prefecture on October 6, 2019, Yamagami gave up because he could not enter the church building. Yamagami told investigators that he initially considered making a bomb and purchased a pressure cooker to create a bomb, but eventually decided to change his plan after realising it could maim or kill innocent bystanders when it exploded. Instead, he made guns that he "could easily fix on a target".

Yamagami decided to target Abe after watching Abe's video speech at the Unification Church on September 12, 2021 in which Abe praised Hak Ja Han, the leader of the church. He proceeded to stalk the former prime minister at various locations as he planned his attack over a period of several months. On the day before the assassination, Yamagami travelled by Shinkansen and attended a Liberal Democratic Party rally in Okayama Prefecture with the intent of killing Abe there; he was forced to backtrack due to entry protocols. After Abe's schedule was changed to allow him to visit Nara City on 8 July, Yamagami kept track of his movements via Abe's website. Yamagami's residence was a five-minute walk from Shin-Ōmiya Station; the westbound next stop on the Kintetsu Nara line is Yamato-Saidaiji Station, where the assassination was carried out. To dry his homemade gunpowder, Yamagami rented an apartment between March and September 2021. He later rented a garage in Nara from November 2021 to February 2022 for the same purpose, costing him 15,000 yen per month. Yamagami was unemployed after resigning in June 2022. At that time, he was 600,000 yen in debt, with 200,000 yen in his savings account. His one-room apartment's rent was 30,000 yen per month. Yamagami told police that he had test-fired his homemade gun in a facility linked to the Unification Church on 7 July, the day he went to Okayama to attend Abe's election campaign and assassinate him, later giving up the plan. Six bullet holes were discovered by investigators at the entrance of a building next to the Nara branch of the Unification Church. Police discovered seven homemade firearms similar to that weapon, two of them unfinished, as well as possible explosive devices, during a search of his home following his arrest. They were later seized as evidence by bomb disposal officers after nearby residents were evacuated. Yamagami stated that he tested his improvised firearms by firing them at multiple wooden boards with an aluminium-covered tray for storing dry gunpowder that he produced from fertiliser, which were later recovered from his vehicle. Plastic-based shotgun shells were also seized by police. Yamagami also claimed that he tested his firearms in the mountains in Nara Prefecture. Yamagami started buying materials needed to make guns and gunpowder in spring 2021, Websites about bomb-making and weapons manufacturing were discovered in Yamagami's browsing history. The gun used in the shooting was fired by a battery igniting the gunpowder with an electric current. The assassination brought the many social issues with the Unification Church under the spotlight again, and precipitated a plunge in the approval of the ruling party. Under the public pressure, the responsible ministry decided to file a dissolution order against the UC with the Tokyo District Court on 13 October 2023, after nearly a year of investigation of misconduct. On 25 March 2025, the district court upheld the dissolution order, although the church considered the option to appeal the ruling.

The Japanese media reported that the difficult circumstances endured by Yamagami and his siblings were very similar to the "shūkyō nisei, otherwise known as the "religious second generations", a Japanese term categorising children being raised by parents who are enthusiastic with their religious practices while neglecting or abusing their children. Abe's assassination brought the shūkyō nisei issue under the spotlight in Japan's mainstream media, and more shūkyō nisei victims began to speak out about their hardships and inaction from the government. During his detention, Yamagami has been permitted to read newspapers. He expressed a strong interest in learning about various societal issues and stated that he did not anticipate his actions would have such significant consequences. He also could not conclude if the situation "is good or bad for other [shūkyō] niseis."

Idolisation Since Yamagami's apprehension, he has been sympathised with and hailed as an icon domestically and abroad. T-shirts printed with Yamagami's photograph during Abe's assassination were being sold on Chinese online marketplaces and were worn by some Chinese people in public events. This is believed to be because of Abe's historical negationism by denying the Japanese war crimes committed in China, paying tributes to war criminals commemorated in Yasukuni Shrine, as well as making pro-Taiwan statements.

In Japan, Yamagami's family has been receiving a considerable amount of gift money, as well as presents like food, clothes, and books via online gifting websites from his supporters, according to his uncle. When Yamagami's Twitter account noted in his letter for Yonemoto was leaked to the public on 17 July 2022, his Twitter followers surged from zero to over 45,000 within one day. His Twitter account received an increase in likes and retweets, until the account was suspended on 19 July. On 10 September 2022, during Yamagami's 42nd birthday, he received messages of celebration and admiration on social media with the hashtag "Tetsuya Yamagami birthday". Japanese people cosplaying Yamagami's appearance during Abe's assassination were spotted at events like the rally against Abe's state funeral. These cosplayers held cardboard signs displaying the leaders they were against: Abe, Ali Khamenei, Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping. Even before Yamagami was being officially tried, online petition website Change.org had received over 8,700 signatures, as of 8 October 2022, which pleaded for reducing Yamagami's sentence.

The preview version of Revolution+1, a fictional-biographical film, which is based on the reports about Yamagami directed by Masao Adachi and was premiered in small theatres across Japan on Abe's state funeral. Some theatres cancelled the screening after receiving public complaints, citing reasons such as "disrespect of the deceased" and "justification of terrorism". In a December 2022 editorial of The Japan Times which discussed Abe's assassination and its aftermath, editor Kanako Takahara commented that the reason that Yamagami was able to attract so much sympathy from society is because "the investigations show that [Yamagami] had a very traumatized experience" and "the anger or any emotions involved were simply transferred to the issues involving the Unification Church", while stating that what Yamagami allegedly did was wrong.

Opposition People who opposed Yamagami criticized that the assassination might inspire copycat crimes. Criminologist warned that "more people began to justify [their radical actions] when dealing with their family and religious issues", and that Yamagami being "treated and followed like a revolutionary leader was alarming". Regarding the Japanese government's actions against the Unification Church after the assassination, supporters of the church such as key LDP member Masahiko Kōmura claimed that the filing of a dissolution order against the church was not justified as it would play right into the hands of the terrorist. Some argued that this claim is logically fallacious, and that fulfilling the perpetrator's goal of committing a crime should not be used to let the church escape justice.