Shūsuke Nomura


Shūsuke Nomura was a Japanese ethnic nationalist activist. He is best remembered for his suicide in the offices of the newspaper Asahi Shimbun.

Life and career

In 1963 Nomura burned down the home of a government minister, for which he served 12 years in prison. In 1977 he took four people hostage at the Japan Federation of Economic Organizations headquarters, for which he served another 6 years in prison. He continued to maintain that circumstances sometimes justified such violence.
Nomura and his Kaze no Kai ran in the 1992 Upper House election. The party was behind in the polls when the Asahi Shimbun published a cartoon in its weekly magazine in which the character for "lice" replaced the character for "wind" in "Kanze no Tō". In reaction, Nomura entered the offices of Asahi dressed in a kimono, proclaimed "Asahi to sashi-chigaeru", and bowed in the direction of the Imperial Palace. He then shot himself with two pistols and died shortly after in the hospital. Media criticized Nomura's act as an attack on freedom of the press.

Legacy

In October 2013 NHK board member distributed an essay at a memorial for Nomura in which she said that Emperor Akihito became a "living god" again when Nomura shot himself, "whatever Constitution might say". Before Japan's loss in World War II, Japanese emperors had been deified, but the postwar constitution demoted the emperor to symbolic, human role.

Works cited