“Shinzo Abe was a man of absolute convictions”

Uhe first shot rang out in the middle of a dumbfounded crowd, suddenly bathed in thick smoke. A second, three seconds later, Shinzo Abe collapses in the middle of a campaign speech, this July 8, 2022, around 11:30 a.m., in Nara, central Japan. In a country that has not seen political violence for decades, the assassination of the former Prime Minister is a thunderclap. The assassin, a 41-year-old ex-soldier, surrendered to the police and immediately admitted having committed his act out of “disagreement” with Abe. Unimaginable radicalism in a country much less polarized than Western democracies.

For Tobias Harris, American scholar of Japanese politics and biographer of the slain Conservative leader (The Iconoclast: Shinzo Abe and the…