Cover Image Commentary—Shooting a Shot: The Decisive Moment of Abe Shinzo's and Asanuma Inejirō’s Assassinations on Camera

Abstract

When Abe Shinzo 安倍晋三 (1955–2022), Japan's former prime minister, was shot from a short distance on July 8, 2022, the audience was stunned, shocked, and halted. Abe briefly turned back to where he heard the shots coming from before dropping to the floor. Mere seconds later, the murderer was caught with a homemade gun, his motivation not quite clear. The whole sequence took only a few seconds and was caught on multiple mobile phone cameras used in a mundane way to snap pictures of the local event by the audience who, looking toward Abe from various angles, unintentionally documented the shooting. The clips instantly became evidence of the crime committed, and were soon after posted on social media, broadcast on television, and shared with billions of viewers around the globe.Abe's assassination was not the first one in Japan's history to be caught on camera. The first was the killing of Asanuma Inejirō’ 浅沼稲次郎 (1898–1960), the leader of Japan's Socialist Party, who was murdered during a televised political debate on October 12, 1960.1 This infamous moment was caught on televised footage, as well as in a renowned image by Nagao Yasushi 長尾靖 (1930–2009), who won the 1961 World Press Photo of the Year2 and the 1961 Pulitzer Prize for that image (fig. 1).3What is so significant about the image of Asanuma's stabbing is the fact that it merges the crucial moment of photography (“the decisive moment,” as coined by Henri Cartier-Bresson [1952] in Images à la sauvette) and the instant of killing—the critical moment of death. Although the press announced the death later, the presence of this specific moment on camera is astonishing to viewers, as it displays the impossibility of the gaze to isolate this split second, while the camera is able to perfectly freeze, uniting together life and death at their point of convergence.In On Photography, Susan Sontag (1973: 10) has memorably discussed the closeness of photography and death, of photography and shooting: the photographer is “loading” the camera, then “aiming” through the viewfinder, till the focal point blends with the target; both the photographer and the assassin release the trigger (or shutter), which makes the process of taking pictures similar to the act of shooting. Yet, the result is not only the moment of death of the one who is shot, but the eternity of the photograph that documents that decisive moment. When the two coalesce, it is a stunning fraction of time.Although Nagao's image does not refer to a rifle or killing by gun, it contains the knifepoint at its center, and the picture is loaded with tension and coiled movement that predicts the looming death. For me, the spectacles dropping from Asanuma's nose and sitting diagonally across his face are the punctum of the image, foretelling his fall to come.In 2006, Morimura Yasumasa 森村泰昌 (b. 1951, Osaka) reenacted Asanuma's killings in two photographs, which are part of his Requiem for the 20th Century series. The reenactment consists of two frames: the reenactment of Nagao's photograph, in which Morimura performs as all men in the frame: the assassin, Asanuma himself, and the crowd (fig. 2, also the cover image for this issue); while the second image (fig. 3) is apparently a repetition of a frame taken from the footage of the stabbing shot in the TV studio where the political debate took place.The reenactment of a decisive moment is a tautological act: for Cartier-Bresson and those taking part in the language of photojournalism, the most important element is the immediacy, the liveness, and the punctual, decisive nature of the snap that is taken at an unrepeatable instant of time. Attempting to reenact this moment is an act of reexperiencing, reassessing, reevaluating the meaning of the political moment in particular, and the meaning of photography in general. Morimura's reenactment of these decisive moments through his shooting of the images is a reminder of the fragility of life and politics. In other words, the assassination of Abe Shinzō was experienced as a return into the past, a repetition of a dark age and practice that led Japan to darker moments of repression and totalitarianism in its history, exactly what makes it such a visceral, emotive experience.