🎌⛩️🇯🇵 17yr old Japanese nationalist Otoya Yamaguchi assassinated socialist Inejirō Asanuma

63 years ago today the legendary 17 year old Japanese nationalist Otoya Yamaguchi assassinated Inejirō Asanuma, the charismatic head of the Japan Socialist Party.

Less than three weeks after the assassination, on 2 November, Yamaguchi took his own life. He wrote on his cell wall, "Long live the Emperor" and “Would that I had seven lives to give for my country” (七生報国, shichishō hōkoku), the latter a reference to the famous last words of fourteenth-century samurai Kusunoki Masashige.

Yamaguchi's deed, and his martyrdom, is widely believed to have prevented the spread of Marxism in Japan.