The face of my father - (Lortie-)Yamagami-Kimura through Legendre
At 9:45 on May 8th, 1984, Corporal Denis Lortie, dressed in his uniform, entered the Parliament Building in Québec City with a pair of C1 submachine guns and an Inglis pistol.1 He moved through the building, gunning down staff, before entering the Assembly Chamber and beginning a standoff with police and the military. This came to an end when René Jalbert, the National Assembly's sergeant-at-arms went in to negotiate with him.2 They retired to Jalbert’s office, and Lortie eventually surrendered to the police.
Before the attack, Lortie dropped off a taped manifesto at a local radio station,3 laying out his dissatisfaction with Premier René Lévesque’s Parti Québécois government and their support for sovereignty for the province. What he eventually told investigators, however, was this: “Le gouvernement du Québec avait le visage de mon père.” The government of Québec had the face of my father.
Lortie's father was an alcoholic tyrant, who physically and sexually abused his eight children. He left the family when Lortie was ten. He went in for a stretch in prison, then disappeared. When Lortie became a father to a son and a daughter, he feared that the sins of his father had been coded into him.4 This touched off a period of mental imbalance, where symbols of authority in his life—his commanding officers, the military itself, the government of Québec, and especially Lévesque—were substituted for his father.
The life stories of Yamagami Tetsuya, the assassin of Abe Shinzo,5 and Kimura Ryuji, the would-be assassin of Kishida Fumio, hit the some of the same notes. The commitment of Yamagami’s mother to the Unification Church has dominated accounts of his life in English, but mentioned less frequently is the suicide of his father.6 Kimura’s father was a truck driver, absent from the family, who squandered the family’s savings on speculative investments.7
Yamagami and Kimura both focused their discontent on powerful men. Yamagami attacked Abe, the symbolic father of the post-prosperity order and inheritor of the legacy of Kishi Nobusuke, patriarch of the postwar order. Kimura saw in Kishida the representation of everything that consigned him to powerlessness. These men were the fathers they did not have.8 Both men resented a generation that had sold out his future.9 The assassinations and foiled assassinations were "genealogical crime," as Pierre Lengendre termed Lortie’s attack. Abe, who fathered no children, became the father of Yamagami Tetsuya, who had no father. Kimura struck at Kishida, who handed out positions to his own son, but promised a future of austerity for the young men of the nation.
These were standard issue for the Canadian Forces, the C1 a variant of the British Sterling submachine gun, the Inglis a variant of the Browning Hi-Power. He had four hundred rounds of 9mm NATO ammunition.
He had access to firearms at Canadian Forces Station Carp, where he had been stationed for several months. The base, a fifteen drive from Parliament Hill, was intended to serve in the event of a catastrophic attack as a final retreat for the leadership of the country. It was decommissioned in 1994.
There is video footage of this. Jalbert connected with Lortie over their shared experience in the Forces. His performance as a negotiator is impressive. He seems not to be perturbed when Lortie, only a few feet away, begins the conversation by spraying rounds into the walls.
He sent another set of taped confessions to the chaplain at Canadian Forces Base Valcartier. I am taking those out of my account and following the version of events laid out in Pierre Legendre’s Le crime du Caporal Lortie. Traité sur le Père. There is a problem with this. It is limiting. But I hope to riff on Legendre, rather than give a straightforward account of what actually happened. For a Lacanian breakdown of the book and a more complicated version of the story, I recommend: “The Père-version of the Political in the Case of Denis Lortie” by Wolfram Bergande.
Based on Bergande’s account, it seems very likely that Lortie’s father sexually abused him, and that he feared that he would do the same to his children, or had already done it. Bergande draws on the autobiography of Lortie’s ex-wife, who recalls physical abuse, and strongly hints at sexual abuse.
I wrote an article about Yamagami: “Yamagami Tetsuya’s Revenge.” I attempted in an earlier draft some amateur psychoanalysis, which was wisely cut by editors.
Yamagami’s family life is laid out in more depth in this article: 山上容疑者を凶行に駆り立てた一族の「壮絶歴史」.
This is covered in this article:「父親は株にハマっていた」「庭は雑草で荒れ果てていた」岸田首相襲撃犯・木村隆二容疑者の家族の内情.
I will get to this in a moment in the main text. But, Abe, notably, was childless. This was often taken as evidence for the unsuitability of his wife, Abe Akie, who was pilloried as a libertine. The childless patriarch also makes a good symbol for a nation undergoing population decline. (Unhappily, though, this was not by choice: the couple struggled to conceive children and finally gave up.) Kishida has three children. They have occasionally been the source of criticism, especially his sons, who have been given positions in his government.
Yamagami family life has already been covered, but it is worth noting that he came of age in what is called the Employment Ice Age 就職氷河期, which is said to run from 1994 to 2004, when the deflating Bubble Economy made it difficult to maintain or find jobs. Kimura, at twenty-four, two decades younger than Yamagami, inherited the results of that period, when casualization of the work force destroyed the chance for most young men to find the permanent, stable employment promised to the postwar salaryman.
Yamagami and Kimura were both interested in intervening in politics, as well. Yamagami saw in the Unification Church-backed Liberal Democratic Party a thoroughgoing corruption, which couldn’t be solved by elections (the Unification Church made sure of this). Kimura in the months before the attack had gone to local political meetings and was infuriated to learn that, even if he raised the tens of thousands of dollars to register as a candidate, that he didn’t make the age cutoff.