TOKYO (AP) — Japanese bid their final goodbye to former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe on Tuesday as a family funeral was held at a temple days after his assassination shocked the nation.
Abe, the country’s longest-serving prime minister, remained influential even after stepping down two years ago for health reasons. He was gunned down Friday during a campaign speech in the western city of Nara.
Hundreds of people, some in formal dark suits, filled sidewalks outside Zojoji temple in downtown Tokyo to bid farewell to Abe, whose nationalistic views drove the governing party’s conservative policies.
Mourners took photos and some called out “Abe san!” as a motorcade with the hearse carrying his body accompanied by his widow, Akie Abe, slowly drove by the packed crowd.
About 1,000 people, including her, Prime Minister Fumio Kishida and senior party leaders as well as foreign officials, attended the funeral at the temple.
At the ceremony, Akie Abe said her husband’s death still sees unreal. “I believe there were many things he left unfinished as a politician. But he had planted many seeds and I’m sure they will sprout,” she was quoted by Japan’s NHK television.
Abe’s long-time ally and mentor, Finance Minister Taro Aso, said the two former prime ministers were “bonded together as they thought about Japan’s national interest together.”
Aso described Abe as “the most talented politician in postwar Japan who raised Japan’s international profile.”
Aso, 81, said he was supposed to be the one to ask Abe to make a condolence speech for him.
The hearse traveled through Tokyo’s main political district, Nagata-cho, where Abe spent more than three decades after being first elected to parliament in 1991. It then drove slowly by the governing party headquarters, where senior lawmakers in dark suits stood outside and prayed, before heading to the prime minister’s office, where Abe served a total of nearly a decade.
Kishida and Cabinet members pressed their hands before their chests as they prayed and bowed toward the hearse heading to a crematorium.
On Sunday, two days after Abe’s killing, his Liberal Democratic Party and its coalition partner won a landslide victory in elections for the upper house, the less powerful of parliament’s two chambers.
That could allow Kishida to govern uninterrupted until a scheduled election in 2025. But Abe’s death also opens up a period of uncertainly for his party. Experts say a power struggle within Abe’s party faction is certain and could affect Kishida’s grip on power.