TOKYO (AP) – The Japanese said goodbye to former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe on Tuesday, as his funeral was held in a temple days after his assassination shocked the nation.
Abe, the country’s longest-serving prime minister, continued to be influential even after resigning two years ago for health reasons. He was shot dead Friday during a campaign speech in the western city of Nara.
Hundreds of people, some in dark formal attire, filled the sidewalks of Zojoji Temple in central Tokyo to say goodbye to Abe, whose nationalist views drove the ruling party’s conservative policies.
The bad guys took pictures and some shouted “Abe san!” like a caravan with the hearse carrying his body accompanied by his widow, Akie Abe, driven slowly by the crowded crowd.
About 1,000 people, including Prime Minister Fumio Kishida, senior ruling party leaders and foreign officials, attended the funeral at the temple.
“I think there were a lot of things he left unfinished as a politician,” NHK public broadcaster quoted Akie Abe as saying. “But he planted a lot of seeds and I’m sure they will sprout.”
Finance Minister Taro Aso, Abe’s longtime ally and mentor, described him as “the most talented politician in post-war Japan who raised Japan’s international profile.”
The hearse traveled through Tokyo’s main political district, Nagata-cho, where Abe spent more than three decades after being first elected to parliament in 1991. He then passed slowly through the ruling party’s headquarters, where the senior lawmakers in dark robes stood outside and prayed. before heading to the prime minister’s office, where Abe served for nearly a decade.
Kishida and cabinet members pressed their hands to their chests as they prayed and leaned toward the hearse heading for a crematorium.
On Sunday, two days after Abe’s assassination, his Liberal Democratic Party and his coalition partner won a landslide victory in the upper house elections, the less powerful of the two chambers of parliament.
This could allow Kishida to govern uninterruptedly until an election scheduled for 2025. But Abe’s death also opens a period of uncertainty for his party. Experts say a power struggle within Abe’s party faction is safe and could affect control of Kishida’s power.
Kishida has stressed the importance of party unity after Abe’s death.
Abe’s assassination has shaken Japan, one of the safest nations in the world with some of the strictest gun laws.
The suspect, Tetsyua Yamagami, was arrested at the same location on Friday and is being held at the local prosecutor’s office for further investigation. They can detain him for up to three weeks while they decide whether to formally file charges.
Police said Yamagami cited a link between Abe and an organization the suspect hated as the motive for the murder. The media said the organization was the Unification Church and that Yamagami did not like it because his mother’s donations to the religious group had bankrupted his family.
The head of the Japanese branch of the South Korean-based church, known for its anti-communist stance and mass weddings, confirmed Monday that the mother was a member. He said Abe was not, but he could have spoken in church-affiliated groups.
On Tuesday, the head of public security, Satoshi Ninoyu, said he has instructed the National Police Agency to investigate the security protocols of political and business leaders.
Abe, the son of a former prime minister, became Japan’s youngest prime minister in 2006 at the age of 52. He left after a year in office for health reasons, but returned to power in 2012.
He promised to revitalize the nation and get its economy out of deflation with its “Abenomics” formula, which combines fiscal stimulus, monetary easing and structural reforms.
His much-loved goals, shared by other ultraconservatives, were to revise Japan’s pacifist constitution drafted by the United States after World War II and transform Japan’s Self-Defense Force into a full-fledged army.
Abe, 67, left the post in 2020, citing a recurrence of ulcerative colitis he had had since he was a teenager.