ＨＯＮＧ　ＫＯＮＧ伝説

I realized I hadn't posted these guys yet.

So all the Starlights were my genderfluid heroes back in college, but especially Seiya - I loved her so much. A year or so ago I got nostalgic and drew these two cuddling for practice. ♥

Redrawing of a Moon Knight: Midnight Mission Comic Panel

Former Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, who was assassinated in July 2022. Inset: Unification Church founder Sun Myung Moon and his wife, Hak Ja Han Moon, in 1984.

SEPTEMBER 18, 2023

On the last morning of his life, Shinzo Abe arrived in the Japanese city of Nara, famous for its ancient pagodas and sacred deer. His destination was more prosaic: a broad urban intersection across from the city’s main train station, where he would be giving a speech to endorse a lawmaker running for reelection to the National Diet, Japan’s parliament. Abe had retired two years earlier, but because he was Japan’s longest-serving prime minister, his name carried enormous weight. The date was July 8, 2022.

In photos taken from the crowd, Abe—instantly recognizable by his wavy, swept-back hair; charcoal eyebrows; and folksy grin—can be seen stepping onto a makeshift podium at about 11:30 a.m., one hand clutching a microphone. A claque of supporters surrounds him. No one in the photos seems to notice the youngish-looking man about 20 feet behind Abe, dressed in a gray polo shirt and cargo pants, a black strap across his shoulder. Unlike everyone else, the man is not clapping.

Abe started to speak. Moments later, his remarks were interrupted by two loud reports, followed by a burst of white smoke. He collapsed to the ground. His security guards ran toward the man in the gray polo shirt, who held a homemade gun—two 16-inch metal pipes strapped together with black duct tape. The man made no effort to flee. The guards tackled him, sending his gun skittering across the pavement. Abe, shot in the neck, would be dead within hours.

At a Nara police station, the suspect—a 41-year-old named Tetsuya Yamagami—admitted to the shooting barely 30 minutes after pulling the trigger. He then offered a motive that sounded too outlandish to be true: He saw Abe as an ally of the Unification Church, a group better known as the Moonies—the cult founded in the 1950s by the Korean evangelist Reverend Sun Myung Moon. Yamagami said his life had been ruined when his mother gave the church all of the family’s money, leaving him and his siblings so poor that they often didn’t have enough to eat. His brother had committed suicide, and he himself had tried to.

“My prime target was the Unification Church’s top official, Hak Ja Han, not Abe,” he told the police, according to an account published in January in a newspaper called The Asahi Shimbun. He could not get to Han—Moon’s widow—so he shot Abe, who was “deeply connected” to the church, Yamagami said, just as Abe’s grandfather, also a prime minister and renowned political figure in Japan, had been.

Investigators looked into Yamagami’s wild-sounding claims and found, to their alarm, that they were true. After a quick huddle, the police appear to have decided that the Moonie connection was too sensitive to reveal, at least for the moment. It might even affect the outcome of the elections for the Upper House of the Diet, set to take place on July 10. At a press conference on the night of the assassination, a police official would say only that Yamagami had carried out the attack because he “harbored a grudge against a specific group and he assumed that Abe was linked to it.” When reporters clamored for details, the official said nothing.

After the election, the Unification Church confirmed press reports that Yamagami’s mother was a member, and the story quickly took off. The Moonies, it emerged, maintained a volunteer army of campaign workers who had long been a secret weapon not just for Abe but for many other politicians in his conservative Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), which remains in power under Prime Minister Fumio Kishida. Later that month, the Japanese tabloid Nikkan Gendai published a list of 111 members of parliament who had connections to the church. In early September 2022, the LDP announced that almost half of its 379 Diet members had admitted to some kind of contact with the Unification Church, whether that meant accepting campaign assistance or paying membership fees or attending church events. According to a survey by The Asahi Shimbun, 290 members of prefectural assemblies, as well as seven prefectural governors, also said they had church ties. The rising numbers exposed a scandal hiding in plain sight: A right-wing Korean cult had a near-umbilical connection to the political party that had governed Japan for most of the past 70 years.

The Japanese were outraged not just by the appearance of influence-peddling but by a galling hypocrisy. Abe was a fervent nationalist, eager to rebuild Japan’s global standing and proudly unapologetic for its imperial past. Now he and his party had been caught in a secretive electoral alliance with a cult that—it soon emerged—had been accused of preying on Japanese war guilt to squeeze billions of dollars from credulous followers.

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This one's for the sailor moon fans.⭐️🌙✨️shoutout to norinoko on devianarts for original illustration😊

Some anime themed items I’ll have at my NYCC table. Come see me and @mernolan at table I-38!!

Drummer magazine 21, 1977 - Robert Opel

The moonies aka unification church is a homophobic and racist movement founded in South Korea in 1956. It recently returned to wider public awareness with the 2022 assassination of former Japanese PM Shinzo Abe who had ties to this cult.

A solid episode from Things Observed providing a brief overview of the World Anti-Communist League

In this episode we cover the origins of the world anti-communist league starting with the Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations and the Asian Peoples Anti-Communist League. This group brings together nazi collaborators from the Ustasha, Iron Guard and the Organization of Ukranian Nationalists. We also cover War Criminals from the days of the Imperial Japanese some of whom we've previously discussed in the Blood and Gold series on the Golden Lily Operation such as Yoshio Kodama and Ryochi Sasakawa. Some of the characters we find in the WACL would be involved not only with fascist movements across the world but would also peddle opium. We discuss the Kuomintang party's connection the world opium trade and the little-known fact that Chiang Kai-Shek's country was a narco-state that worked alongside the Civil Air Transport and the CIA and how the National Crime Syndicate would get in on the action as well. Oh, and how can I forgot to mention the Moonie connection!

Sources:

VISUP: Secret Societies, Narcoterrorism, International Fascism and the World Anti-Communist League Part I (visupview.blogspot.com) - Recluse

Inside the League: The Shocking Expose of How Terrorists, Nazis, and Latin American Death Squads Have Infiltrated the World Anti-Communist League - Scott Anderson and Jon Lee Anderson

Gold Warriors: America’s Secret Recovery of Yamashita’s Gold - Sterling and Peggy Seagrave

One Nation Under Blackmail Vol I - Whitney Webb

Opium and the Politics of Gangsterism - Jonathan Marshall

History of the Opium Problem: The Assault on the East - Hans Derks

The Politics of Heroin - Alfred McCoy

hiiii, so i decided to make a poll again! this time; for sailor moon! with sailor moon’s new movie coming this summer to the US, and already out in some other places, I want to know - who do you prefer?

Eeee I made an ENA oc

His name is Oopsie and he likes gardening :)

ムーンライト伝説 Nobody: Absolutely no one: Sailor Moon Fans: