Roughly thirteen whole weeks ago, which feels like a small eternity in these troubled times, I sat down to start working on a two-year-later retrospective on the assassination of Japan’s controversial right wing Prime Minister, Shinzo Abe. My draft went something like this…
In 1960 socialist candidate Inejirō Asanuma was assassinated during a recorded debate by ultra rightist Otoya Yamaguchi who stabbed the politician twice with a samurai sword before being apprehended. The image of spectacular bushido violence was emblematic of Japan’s postwar reality, a nation uncertain of how to feel about its Imperial past now grappling with Cold War inspired internal strife. If we compare that to Shinzo Abe’s “doohickey” gun slaying six decades later at the hands of Tetsuya Yamagami, I think we see an interesting metric of how Japan, and the rest of the developed world, has changed. The Asanuma assassination, much like the assassination of JFK and the subsequent assassination of Lee Harvey Oswald in the United States just a few years later, have to be seen in the context of the Cold War—an total ideological struggle for the fate of the world. One may have expected Abe’s killer to have been some kind of avowed leftist or even a former peacenik. Abe was controversial due to his attempts to rehabilitate Japan’s maligned nationalist sentiments. From a certain perspective, he was the more professional version of Yamaguchi–attempting to restore the Emperor via the ballot instead of the katana. As it turned out, Yamagami had more of a personal vendetta than a political one. Yamagami was angry at the Unification Church which had effectively looted his family. His plans for revenge originally involved extensive research and experimentation in bomb making, but when he decided that Abe would be his target, due to his deep and clearly cynical connections with the UC, he put that ballistic knowledge to work by making a battery ignited homemade shotgun. I think the weapons of choice and even the way in which they were wielded during the two most significant assassinations in modern Japan’s history is relevant here. The sword used to kill Asanuma, and the homemade gun used to kill Abe. The former being a symbol of Japan’s lost warrior spirit, the latter being an otaku’s weaponized model gundam. Yamaguchi storming the stage in a screaming banzai charge during his attack before being pulled away from his victim. Yamagami calmy firing two buckshots into Abe before calmly waiting to be arrested. Perhaps Japan has come full circle, since 1960 Shinto Fascism and Pinko Socialism were both discarded in the wake of Japan’s stunning economic rise. In the intermediate decades, especially as economic malaise set it, Japan’s biggest internal enemy came from extremist cults, best exemplified by Aum Shinrikyo’s 1995 sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway which killed 13 people. Perhaps it is somewhat ironic that Yamaguchi saw himself as part of this anti-cult tradition in his struggle against the Unification Church. Before his shooting of Abe, he tried to establish a correspondence with one of Japan’s leading anticult journalists, Eito Suzuki…
That was about as far as I got before I rewarded myself with a phone break. Only to see that another aggrieved loner had opened fire at a Donald Trump rally in Pennsylvania. I tried to turn back to my cultural analysis of Japan, only to find myself constantly checking for updates on the fate of the Don. The first videos that made their way through social media only showed the former President falling to the ground as a volley of shots could be heard. It would be a few hours before the now iconic picture of the defiant Trump—blood dripping from his ear as he held his fist in the air while Secret Service agents desperately tried to wrestle the shining behemoth off stage—would become 2024’s stimulus to t-shirt vendors nationwide. When the news came through that Trump had allegedly only suffered a grazing of his ear I couldn’t help but think of Ronald Reagan who managed to keep the full extent of his injuries hidden from the public following John Hinckley’s failed assassination attempt. Even if Trump was alive, could he have been decommissioned?
I then decided to wait for more details. Who was the mystery gunman who came within an inch of ending MAGA as we know it? Would he be an ideologue? A Leftist? A Latino? A Jihadist? A Transgender? All of the above? When it turned out to be Thomas Matthew Crooks, an ideologically opaque white boy, a year short of being old enough to drink, with the standard school shooter phenotype who had probably just seen Trump as a target of opportunity, the disappointment and relief on the Right and Left respectively was palpable. I then decided I’d reboot my Abe post mortem by comparing Yamagami and Crooks. They were, after all, both representatives of a new class of downwardly mobile men who, believing however rightly or wrongly that they had no prospects in life, opted for revenge on their former national leaders. They were also both explosives enthusiasts of the distinctly Information Age autistic terror-cell-of-one variety. In a word, they were both perfect examples of the weaponized loser who is rapidly becoming a staple of post-industrial nations everywhere. Different cultures, common psychosis? Hm. No, I thought, too tenuous. Maybe I would have to wait for more details. Or maybe I would have to abandon the article altogether.
I watched Biden “drop out” following the truly House of Cards worthy “Pelosi Putsch”, the Kamala Harris media blitz, RFK Jr enter stage left to endorse Trump as fireworks blazed behind him in a Q/Anon fever dream, as well as the Republican and Democratic conventions come and go. I was preoccupied with work, but new, strange and invasive thoughts began to stir in me. I went on a short trip to Chicago before flying back to the west coast after two years away. My new place of residence, deep in the woods of the Pacific North West, did not have the internet and, as it turns out, didn’t even have a line connecting it to the internet as it had been mysteriously severed by the previous owners. I decided to enjoy my time off-grid, but even in my micro-Walden retreat the invasive thoughts kept coming. The heat, I thought. The heat. The heat. The heat. The collective rage and psychosis. The sensationalized violence is only the tip of the ice berg and the ice berg is melting. No, it’s deeper than that. It’s magma. No, it’s bigger than that. It’s solar.
Maybe there was something to this common psychosis idea after all. I have often thought of the ways in which America and the far east mirror each other. China with its rising industry, middle class and expectations—something like our own Gilded Age. America with it’s opioid addled quasi civil war, declining middle class, and disgruntled nouveau peasants —something like their Century of Humiliation. In other words, China’s future could look remarkably like America’s past. America’s future could look remarkably like China’s past. But it’s always been Japan that has proved to be the best bellwether in my opinion. I heard it argued somewhere once that Japan is the only nation to have gone from premodernity to postmodernity with no intermediate stage save World War II. Since then, Japan has kept one foot in the past and one foot in the future and its seemingly unique instances of future shock herald cultural shifts in the rest of the developed world. I saw an old news report once about how a strange new form of communication known as ‘‘texting’’ was sweeping over Japan’s youth. Demolished and rebuilt by America in its own image, Japan sublimated its samurai spirit into business conquest (becoming the world’s second largest economy behind America for several decades until finally being surpassed by China in 2010). As Paul Tsongas said in 1992, “The cold war is over; Japan won.” Japan’s economic miracle came at a cost, however. The home of video games, walkmans and the earliest versions of smartphones gave way to a solipsistic youth culture that is best exemplified by the hikikomori (withdraw) phenomenon. There are, according to some estimates, millions of self exiled young people, mostly men, in Japan who eschew work, education, and family in favor of a devoted electronic entertainment based monasticism. The hikikomori who was, a decade or so ago, a textbook example of how ‘weird’ Japan is, would now be quickly recognized as the new normal for millions of young men living in the rest of the advanced world by people who might just refer to them as “incels.”
A man from the telecom company came and drilled a hole in the wall for the new fiberoptic cable that would reconnect me with cyberspace. I sat down to write another reboot. This time it would be about Yamagami and Crooks in contrast to Oswald and Yamaguchi: Cold Warriors replaced by Hikikomori Ronin. I was just getting started when I went to search for some information about Crooks when, and I absolutely shit you not, news was just breaking about the second attempt on Trump’s life at his Florida golf course. I was actually confused as to why the wrong pictures and dates were showing up—enshittification strikes again, I thought. But, no. It finally dawned on me that another lone gunman had tried to take a shot at the Donald. Unlike Crooks or Yamagami, however, Ryan Routh was not a young man with poor life prospects but a middle aged man who’d apparently been fully brain rotted by social media algorithms. And while he did seem to have some kind of ideological bone to pick, his schizoposting was characteristically too incoherent for any kind of Oswald-esque “I’m just a patsy,” schtick.
I don’t shy away from the fact that I am quite partial to magical thinking, and I simply could not help but feel that author, history and article were synchronistically merging before my very tired eyes. At this point, I decided that I would have to quit writing about this. I felt implicated and spiritually tainted. If I have learned anything in my years of being terminally online, it’s that the internet should be used to filter reality, but not be allowed to form a chimera with it. Besides, I’ve been woefully neglectful of my other duties. Don’t I have a podcast to do? Isn’t my egregiously overcooked Winds of Winter of a novel still shamefully unfinished? At the very least there are some much better articles I have on the backburner. You know, I’m turning into something of a hikikomori myself. Pretty soon, seppuku-by-fountain pen will be the only option left to preserve my honor. But the invasive thoughts wouldn’t leave me. The sun. The sun. The sun. The miniaturized big bangs exploding over Hiroshima and Nagasaki unleashed a divine wind slowly made its way over the pacific and across the United States. The singular solar disk of Japan, which was nothing less than the Emperor incarnate, was overcome and replaced by America’s starry constellation of federated states. Go forth and prosper, we said, trade your steel blades for cubicles. But we were wrong, we thought we were cooking them. But the spirit of the Empire was cooking us.
Had Trump’s head remained within that fateful inch of Crook’s line of fire, it would have resulted in images of political violence so graphic that it would have put the Zapruder Film to bed once and for all. Except unlike with Zapruder, however, the public would not have had to wait years to see it. It would have been everywhere, being retweeted and relived infinitely. In that sense, it would have been a memetic to equivalent of 9/11. Trump’s position as Jesus Christ Superstar, messiah of MAGA, would have been fulfilled by martyrdom—and the thirst for revenge that those images would have inspired would have been unquenchable. The violence I had found to be intentionally ridiculous in Alex Garland’s Civil War would have suddenly seemed much less so. Had Routh succeeded, granted he didn’t get anywhere as close as Crooks, and slayed Trump on a golf course it would have been comical. Not to say that it would have been funny, but undeniably comical. In a purely theatrical sense, the idea of a man like Donald Trump being killed on a golf course would feel more like something from an absurd crime caper than a typical American assassination. The lack of witnesses, that is to say the absence of a public execution, would have also been a source of disbelief and distrust. It’s not hard to imagine Q-cultists arguing that he had faked his death and was in hiding somewhere while preparing for the final storm. It’s also not hard for me to imagine that belief going mainstream among Republicans and their fellow travelers. In other words, he would been less like a new JFK, and more like a new Tupac. I don’t know which scenario would have been worse. The only reason I raise these counterfactuals is that they give us a sense of just how much heat, and I can only describe it as heat, is pulsing through the country right now.
But this brings me to my final point, and the only reason I decided to sit down and finish this nightmarish article within an article within an article as fast I can before any October surprise can come along and knocks me off balance again. With the Supreme Court’s decision to grant legal immunity to Presidents for “official acts” it occurs to me finally that the most peculiar aspect of this election, which is already hands down the strangest election in America’s history (only 1872 is a close contender) is not the assassination attempts or internecine party conflicts, but the simple fact that America is no longer electing a President at all—but an Emperor. Sure, the power of the presidency has been increasing at an alarming rate since at least 2001. We all knew that, but now it feels official. The cat is out of the bag. There’s always been an aura of royal pomp around the presidency that we’ve always tried to deny or downplay in America, but now it can’t be. No one is pretending that the Oval Office is anything other than a throne room now.
In Trump we have our wounded hermit king. A man denied his crown who claims that he only wants to make America Sakoku again–an isolated nation free from the burdens and entanglements of barbarian foreigners much like Tokugawa shogunate. The RNC in Milwaukee represented a watershed moment in American politics. Trump's complete and total demolition of the GOP I grew up under and its replacement with the court of the golden king. His final slap in the face of the old guard came in the form of crowning JD Vance his hillbilly prince and heir apparent by making him his VP over much more “deserving” or experienced Republicans.
I hate to be that guy, but Trump's speech at the RNC, was, at least for a few surreal moments, the most Lynchican thing to happen outside of an actual David Lynch production. The perfectly square ear wrap was something that could have come directly out of Twin Peaks: The Return, and like Agent Cooper's Dougie persona, Trump seemed to be a changed man. At an earlier speech in Grand Rapids, Michigan, his first since he was almost assassinated the first time, Trump managed to get the crowd to boo Project 2025 (15:45) as he denounced the “severe right.” He also made fun of his own combover (51:45). Maybe I'm reading too much into it, but Trump trademarked MAGA the day after Obama, and several others, made fun of him at the White House Correspondents' dinner in 2011. If you go back and watch Obama’s roast and Trump’s less than gracious reception of it, you might actually see the moment MAGA was officially born. Trump coming full circle to embrace this in a rare moment of self deprecation felt shocking to me. What if, the mandate of heaven had punished the Democrats by saving Donnie, but will now punish the Republicans by slowly turning him into a starry eyed goober? I would be lying if I said I wasn't in awe for the first twenty minutes or so of Trump's RNC speech, in one of the few times I believe he showed real emotion, and when he repeated, 'I shouldn't be here,' the audience rose up to challenge him but he insisted. Counter signaling his audience is something Trump almost never does. The moment of introspection over, however, Trump spent the rest of his time meandering through a highlight reel of his regularly scheduled stump speeches and talking points. 2024’s RNC was the first to remove its former positions on Abortion and Gay Marriage from its platform. Similarly, at the DNC in Chicago a few weeks later, Universal Health Care vanished from the Democratic Party’s platform.
With the old GOP gone, the DNC has been reborn as the official RINOcrat party as Harris has been happy to enlist the help of disaffected Republicans in a campaign that often feels more Mitt Romney 2012 than Barack Obama 2008. In Harris we have something of a Meiji Restoration. It was Emperor Mejii who put Japan on the path to becoming a modern, global empire as the island nation moved to assert itself on the world stage for the first time. I imagine the Emperor would be quite pleased to hear Harris vowing to defeat China and maintain America’s Co-Prosperity Sphere in the face of cowardly isolationists:
“As Commander-in-Chief, I will ensure America always has the strongest, most lethal fighting force in the world. I will fulfill our sacred obligation to care for our troops and their families. And I will always honor, and never disparage, their service and their sacrifice. I will make sure that: We lead the world into the future on space and Artificial Intelligence. That America—not China—wins The competition for the 21st century. And that we strengthen—not abdicate—our global leadership.”
There is, I think, if you can believe it, something refreshing about all of this. It feels like Liberalism and Conservatism as we’ve known them are dissolving—melted down by the simmering sun of American power. The “culture war” is quietly being jettisoned by both sides in favor of realpolitik—there’s a mad dash to the center, and that center is power, raw and unapologetic. All the residual energy from America’s post war world order, from the atom to the internet, are now leaking and irradiating the nation—the heat is palpable. Appeals to traditional values or social justice just don’t have the same currency that they used to when war and inflation loom over our heads. When we all know the winner of the election will become a demigod the rhetoric will slowly but surely boil down to bullets and bucks. Take your pick.
Banzai, America!