TOKYO–The mayor of the Japanese city of Nagasaki was shot to death in a brazen attack yesterday by an organized crime chief apparently enraged that the city refused to compensate him after his car was damaged at a public works construction site, police said.
The shooting was rare in a country where handguns are strictly banned and only five politicians are known to have been killed since World War II.
Mayor Iccho Ito, 61, was shot twice in the back at point-blank range outside a train station last night, Nagasaki police official Rumi Tsujimoto said.
One of the bullets struck the mayor's heart and he went into cardiac arrest, said Nagasaki University Hospital spokesperson Kenzo Kusano. Ito died after emergency surgery.
Tetsuya Shiroo, a senior member of Yamaguchi-gumi, Japan's largest organized crime syndicate, was wrestled to the ground by officers after the attack and arrested, police said.
It was the second attack in the last 20 years against a mayor of Nagasaki, which was destroyed by a U.S. atomic bomb in the closing days of World War II in 1945 and whose leaders have actively campaigned against militarism.
In 1990, Mayor Hitoshi Motoshima was shot and seriously wounded after saying Japan's emperor, beloved by rightists, bore some responsibility for World War II.
Shiroo reportedly clashed with Nagasaki city officials in 2003 after his car was damaged when he drove into a hole at a public works site. He tried unsuccessfully to get compensation from the city after his insurance company refused to pay up, according to Japanese broadcaster NHK.
Shiroo also sent a letter to broadcaster TV Asahi to protest recent money scandals linked to Ito, including hidden accounts and public works contracts, Kyodo reported.
Backed by the ruling Liberal Democratic Party, Ito was campaigning for his fourth term in office before Sunday's elections. He was active in the movement against nuclear proliferation, heading a coalition of Japanese cities calling for the elimination of nuclear weapons.
"Mayor Ito had a strong and boundless passion for peace," said Sunao Tsuboi, leader of a survivors' group based in Hiroshima, a city also flattened by a U.S. atomic bomb in 1945.
Commonly known as yakuza, Japan's organized crime groups are typically involved in real estate and construction kickback schemes, extortion, gambling, the sex industry, gunrunning and drug trafficking.
The yakuza also have had a long-standing political alliance with right-wing nationalists in Japan, although authorities did not indicate that yesterday's attack was politically motivated.
Organized crime groups are behind most shootings in Japan, with two-thirds of the country's 53 known shootings last year being gang-related, according to the National Police Agency. Police estimate there are about 84,500 gangsters across Japan.
Ito was born in Nagasaki on Aug. 23, 1945, two weeks after the atomic bomb devastated the coastal city on Japan's southernmost main island of Kyushu.
In 2002, a ruling party politician was fatally stabbed in a dispute over political funds. In the 1990s, a Liberal Democrat lawmaker was killed at his home by his daughter and an opposition lawmaker was stabbed to death by a mental patient.
Last year, an extremist burned down the house of a ruling party lawmaker after the politician criticized then-prime minister Junichiro Koizumi's pilgrimage to a controversial Tokyo war shrine.
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