Saturday, July 09, 2022

Yamagami the assassin

The man who killed Shinzo Abe may have a spookily (in)auspicious name: Tetsuya Yamagami. The surname is interesting because it could be a short form of yama-no-kami (山の神), or mountain spirit (what Koreans would call 山神, 산신, sanshin). 

The Japanese have their own native-Japanese ways of pronouncing Chinese characters, which is how you get kamikaze (神風, Kor. shin-poong, Sino-Jpn. shinpu), or "wind of the gods." The same kami (神, shin, "god/spirit") is found in Yamagami's name, and yama is Japanese for "mountain." Yamagami could be read in other ways, of course, but mountain spirit is the eeriest reading: the yama-no-kami came down from the heights to claim Shinzo Abe.

"Tetsuya" apparently means "philosophy" or "intelligence." Obviously a misnomer.



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