Suspect in Japan PM attack may have had election grudge

An unemployed 24-year-old man who allegedly threw a pipe bomb at Prime Minister Fumio Kishida wanted to be a politician and believed that he was unfairly blocked from running for Japan’s parliament by an age requirement, according to media reports and social media posts that appeared to be his. The suspect, Ryuji Kimura, was wrestled to the ground and arrested on Saturday at a campaign event in the fishing port of Saikazaki, in the western Japanese city of Wakayama. The explosive, believed to be a pipe bomb, landed near Kishida, who escaped unhurt. Kimura has refused to talk to police, but reports that he became angry after failing to register for an election and had sued the government might shed light on his motives. In June last year he filed a lawsuit with the Kobe District Court claiming that he should have been allowed to register for the July 2022 Upper House election. A candidate must be aged 30 years or older and present a 3 million yen (USD 22,260) deposit to run for the upper house, the less powerful of Japan’s two-chamber parliament. He was 23 at the time. He demanded the government pay 100,000 yen (USD 740) in compensation for his psychological anguish, according to Japanese media reports, including NHK public television and Kyodo News. Violent crimes are rare in Japan. With its strict gun control laws, the country has only a handful of gun-related crimes annually, most of them gang related. But in recent years Japanese police have worried about “lone offender” attacks with homemade guns and explosives. Former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe was assassinated with a homemade gun at a campaign event on July 8, just two days before the upper house election. Kimura, reportedly unemployed, might have blamed society for his circumstances, an expert said. “Some people already see themselves as dropouts with no future, and they blame society for making their lives difficult,” says Nobuo Komiya, a Rissho University criminologist. “There may have be