On October 12, 1960, the leader of the Socialist Party, Asanuma Inejiro, was assassinated in front of a live audience as well as all of those watching the televised broadcast of the debate that he was currently participating in. Said debate was over the upcoming election of the House of Representatives. Now, when people hear the word "assassinated," they think of one pulling the trigger of a gun in order to end the life of another person. In this case, though, the man who assassinated Asanuma, Yamaguchi Otoya, rushed on to the stage and delivered Asanuma's fate with a Wakizashi, a type of Samurai sword. Quite honestly, upon reading this, I was surprised at the audacity of such a murder considering that most people including myself see the Japanese in general as being much less forward, but I suppose that there are exceptions to every general belief.
This incident resulted in an outcry across the country for a more peaceful country, which is rather commendable, because they could have just as easily been divided even more by political opinions. That's not to say that political opinions weren't further divided, as they were, but these divisions never affected anything beyond politics. Perhaps the biggest change that occurred in the wake of this event was the creation of the Social Democratic Party in January of 1996. The Social Democratic Party has gone on to become one of the larger parties in Japan.
Now, you may wonder why I decided to pick out such an obscure event.... Well, the answer is quite simple really: if I picked out something that I had even the slightest idea about, then I would not have learned as much from writing about it as I would have from writing about a topic that I had never heard of before.
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