Reports are coming in that former Prime Minister Abe Shinzu was shot in Nara City

Multiple reports that he was shot twice from behind, during a campaign speech supporting candidates in this Sunday's elections, with a homemade weapon like a shotgun, and afterwards, that he was bleeding from the chest, and suffered a cardiac arrest.  He was conscious at the start of the helicopter flight to hospital and was unresponsive by the time he arrived.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/jul/08/shinzo-abe-former-japan-prime-minister-shot-during-speech-reports

https://twitter.com/ScottMStedman/status/1545247944562974721 - has a link to asahi shinbun with details.  

The alleged shooter did not try to get away and is in custody.

Friday morning follow up:

And they’ve confirmed that it killed him - https://www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/rcna37228 

I was on the Nijikaiwa call last night when one of them saw the news. One of the regulars had met him several times when he was in Japan and appealing for foreigners to get a lump sum distribution from the pension taxes that you pay in.

He said that he was always nice and he had never heard a bad word said about him, which I think is amazing for a politician.  I know we all think of Japanese society as polite, but there are still ways to express a bad opinion of someone, it just has to be phrased differently, so even by itself, that’s an achievement in politics  

It’s so vanishingly rare for Japan for something like this to happen. Over here they had to redefine a mass shooting so that they weren’t happening every hour (the original definition was more than 2 people, and they had to increase the definition to more than 3 people to get them to be a slightly unusual event), but in Japan it is really rare.


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