Unification Church members rally in Seoul on Aug. 18, 2022, to protest against the media coverage the group received in Japan following the assassination in early July of former Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe. Photo: Anthony Wallace/AFP via Getty Images

Elle Hardy is a journalist and author of “Beyond Belief: How Pentecostal Christianity Is Taking Over the World.”

He has a stan culture to rival K-pop idols, a fund bankrolled by sympathizers, and has been labeled one of the “most successful assassins” in history. Beginning on Tuesday, Tetsuya Yamagami, the man who shot Japan’s longest-serving prime minister with a homemade gun, is standing trial. But in the eyes of many of his countrymen, the real defendant in the dock is Japan’s political system itself.

When Yamagami pulled the

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