TRAFFIC by Alma Reyes Fear Without Truth On July 8, 2022, around 11:30 a.m., Japan stopped breathing for the rest of the day. The assassination of former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe jolted the entire world like a vicious thunderbolt. Chaos, confusion, anger, grievance, fear—this flurry of emotions was enough to spiral in every single person’s heart and mind, Abe supporter or not. Naturally, the first word that spurted out was “WHY?” The nation’s unprecedented political icon who strived determinedly to build Japan’s economy for more than eight years has even been compared to John F. Kennedy and what he had meant to the U.S. I, myself was not an Abe follower, but his demise burrowed a deep hole inside me. Is it the surprise of death that steps in unhesitatingly without invitation? Is it sadness that hatred lurks so vengefully in humans? Is it fear that people have reached no limit to deliberately destroy a person’s life, his family and aspirations to make meaning of this temporary life he has been given? Every act of premeditated murder is, after all, personal. Motives may range variably from money,
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jealousy, contempt, revenge, to mental disability, but stems out of personal choice. When agitation, rage and desperation summit the ultimate peak of hopelessness beyond the inability to suppress one’s emotion, murder becomes a spiteful tool for defying self-control. Consequently, it translates into a declaration of a statement, which observers often never understand. What did former Prime Minister Abe’s assassination mean to
the Japanese people? Firstly, an article was published about how the word “assassination” was never used in the Japanese media to pertain to this horrific incident. Instead, the words that echoed were “shot” or “died,” but not “assassinated.” The article analyzed that in Japan “assassination” usually refers to “foreign” occurrences, such as the shoot-down of JFK, Martin Luther King, Malcom X, and others—but, not for Japanese figures. Oxford Dictionary defines “assassinate” as
July - August 2022
