Otoya Yamaguchi (山口 二矢, Yamaguchi Otoya, 22 February 1943 – 2 November 1960) was a Japanese right-wing ultranationalist youth who assassinated Inejirō Asanuma, chairman of the Japan Socialist Party, on 12 October 1960. Yamaguchi rushed the stage and stabbed Asanuma with a wakizashi-like short sword while Asanuma was participating in a televised election debate at Hibiya Public Hall in Tokyo. Yamaguchi, who was 17 years of age at the time, had been a member of Bin Akao’s far-right Greater Japan Patriotic Party, but had resigned earlier that year, just prior to the assassination.[1] After being arrested and interrogated, Yamaguchi committed suicide while in a detention facility.
Yamaguchi became a hero and a martyr to Japanese far-right groups, who as of 2022,[2] have continued to hold commemorations to this day.[3] Yamaguchi’s actions inspired a number of copycat crimes, including the Shimanaka incident in 1961, and inspired Nobel Prize-winning novelist Kenzaburō Ōe’s novellas Seventeen and Death of a Political Youth.[4][5] A photograph of the Asanuma assassination taken by Japanese photojournalist Yasushi Nagao won World Press Photo of the Year for 1960 and the 1961 Pulitzer Prize.[6][7]
These shitheads and their fucking political violence. If you thought your party could win the hearts and minds of the people, you wouldn’t need to resort to violence, you weak fuck. Same as shitheads defending their all-powerful god from someone slandering them.