One of the most disturbing things about the death of Shinzo Abe is that there might not be much to learn from it at all.
The media focus has zeroed in on the Unification Church, the organization better known as the Moonies, to which suspect Tetsuya Yamagami’s mother belonged and reportedly donated hundreds of thousands of dollars. That bankrupted her family and left Yamagami with a grudge against Abe, who had given speeches to organizations related to the group.
But understanding this background may turn out to be as useful as knowing about actress Jodie Foster in order to make sense of the attempted assassination of Ronald Reagan in 1981. Reagan’s would-be assassin, John Hinckley Jr., famously sought to kill the president in order to impress Foster, whom he was obsessed with. A few months earlier, John Lennon had been gunned down in an equally senseless attack by Mark David Chapman, who was said to have been inspired by the J.D. Salinger novel "The Catcher in the Rye.”