Tokyo (Japan)- Former Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe is in critical condition after being shot during a campaign speech in Nara.
Japanese leader Fumio Kishida said doctors “were doing everything they can” to save the 67-year-old.
“I am hoping and praying that Abe will survive this,” Kishida said on Friday afternoon. The Japanese prime minister said the attack on Abe during a Japanese election campaign was an attack on “the very foundation of democracy”.
“It is barbaric, malicious and cannot be tolerated,” he said.
Japan’s national broadcaster NHK earlier reported that two gunshots were heard at the scene.
Chief Cabinet Secretary Hirokazu Matsuno confirmed Abe has been shot.
Kyodo News reported just after 11.30 am, Tokyo time, that Abe was unconscious and unresponsive. Local station MBS also reported that Abe was in a state of cardiac arrest. NHK said he was showing no vital signs.
Local police have arrested a 41-year-old man, identified as Yamagami Tatsuya, for attempted murder. Witnesses told NHK that they heard two shots and saw a large gun at the scene.
“I heard one shot and another shot,” said one witness. “Then I saw the suspect with something larger than a handgun. Then the secret service jumped on top of him. It was shocking.”
Another witness said Abe was in the middle of his speech when a man approached him from behind.
“It looked like a toy or a bazooka. The first shot was just a noise. In the second shot we could see the gunpowder and a lot of white smoke,” the witness said.
“After the second shot Abe collapsed and people were applying CPR. The gunman did not attempt to run away he was just standing there.”
Abe, the most influential Japanese politician of his generation and the country’s longest-serving prime minister, retired in 2020 but remains a significant powerbroker in the ruling Liberal Democratic Party.
He was giving a speech outside the Yamato-Saidaiji Station in Nara, near Kyoto, when he was shot with what appeared to be a handmade or modified gun.
Abe was in the middle of campaigning on behalf of the LDP for upper house elections. The election, due on Sunday, is seen as a key test of Prime Minister Fumio Kishida’s hold on power after he replaced Yoshihide Suga in October. Kishida had stacked his cabinet with Abe allies to maintain his links to the LDP’s conservative base.
Kishida was on Friday rushing back to his office in Tokyo after cancelling his own campaign speech.
Matsuno, the chief cabinet secretary, said the government was still getting updates on Abe’s condition.
“Other cabinet members who are currently campaigning throughout Japan have been instructed to return to Tokyo as soon as possible,” Matsuno said. “Such violence cannot be tolerated, and we condemn it in the heaviest way.”
Former Australian prime minister Malcolm Turnbull – who was close to Abe during his time in office – said he was horrified by the news from Japan.
“Abe Shinzo is one of the great leaders of our times,” he said. “Right now we must hope and pray that he pulls through.”
Shinzo Abe got shot today Recalls Japan’s Prewar History of Political Violence
The shooting of former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe is a particular shock in Japan, where gun ownership is tightly restricted and political violence affecting top leaders has been rare in recent decades.
The shooting recalls Japan’s turbulent pre-World War II era when assassinations occurred more frequently and were used as a political tool.
One of Japan’s most influential and longest-serving prime ministers, Hirobumi Ito, was killed in 1909—after he had left office—at a train station in what is now northeast China. The assassin was a Korean nationalist who objected to Japan’s colonization of the Korean peninsula, which the Tokyo government completed the following year.
Tokyo Station still has a plaque marking the spot where then-Prime Minister Takashi Hara was fatally stabbed on Nov. 4, 1921, by a railway switchman who objected to the government’s policies.
Political violence increased in the 1930s as ultra-rightists tried to undermine the multiparty constitutional government that had emerged in previous decades. In the most famous clash, plotters of an attempted coup on Feb. 26, 1936, assassinated an influential finance minister, Korekiyo Takahashi, and others. The prime minister barely escaped with his life.
The coup was quashed, but military influence over the government increased and led to Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941 and its entry into World War II.
After the war, when Japan became a democracy with a figurehead emperor, political violence mostly ceased, with a few exceptions. In 1960, the head of an opposition party was fatally stabbed during an election campaign speech. In 2007, the mayor of Nagasaki, an opponent of nuclear weapons, was shot dead by a member of a right-wing group.