1. Otoya Yamaguchi was a Japanese right-wing ultranationalist youth who assassinated Inejiro Asanuma, chairman of the Japan Socialist Party, on 12 October 1960.
15 Facts About Otoya Yamaguchi
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Otoya 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.
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Otoya Yamaguchi became a hero and a martyr to Japanese far-right groups, who as of 2022, have continued to hold commemorations to this day.
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Otoya Yamaguchi's actions inspired a number of copycat crimes, including the Shimanaka incident in 1961, and inspired Nobel Prize-winning novelist Kenzaburo Oe's novellas Seventeen and Death of a Political Youth.
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Otoya Yamaguchi was born on 22 February 1943 in Yanaka, Taito ward, Tokyo.
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Otoya Yamaguchi was the second son of Shinpei Yamaguchi, who by 1960 would become a high-ranking officer in the Japan Ground Self-Defense Force, and was the maternal grandson of the famous writer Namiroku Murakami, well known for his violent novels glorifying the chivalric code of Japanese organized crime syndicates known as the yakuza.
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Otoya Yamaguchi then decided to move to Tokyo to live with his brother, and transferred back to Tamagawa High School.
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Otoya Yamaguchi participated in these counter-protest activities, and was arrested and released 10 times over the course of 1959 and 1960, within his first six months since joining Akao's party.
9.
On 12 October 1960, Otoya Yamaguchi was in the large crowd of 2,500 spectators at a televised election debate held in Hibiya Public Hall in Hibiya Park in central Tokyo, featuring Suehiro Nishio of the Democratic Socialist Party, Inejiro Asanuma of the Japan Socialist Party, and Hayato Ikeda of the Liberal Democratic Party.
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Otoya Yamaguchi was thereafter swarmed and detained by bystanders.
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At the time of his arrest at the scene of the murder, Otoya Yamaguchi had a notebook in his pocket describing Asanuma's actions as unforgivable, as well as detailing his motivations for the attack.
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Otoya Yamaguchi spoke of goals pertaining to causing the restriction of behavior for future left-wing leaders, as well as a desire to negatively influence public perception of left-wing leaders and their ideology.
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Otoya Yamaguchi spoke of Akao respectfully, referring to him using the honorific sensei stating that Akao was more interested in "media attention" and "agitation", as opposed to actively putting his words and ideals to practice.
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Otoya Yamaguchi told police that Akao would have prevented him from carrying out the assassination had he known of his intentions, as well as consistently maintaining that he had acted alone and without any direction from others, stating the inaction on Akao's part as a component of his motivation and reasoning for resigning from the party and committing the offense.
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Otoya Yamaguchi then knotted strips of his bedsheet into a makeshift rope and used it to hang himself from a light fixture.