Otoya Yamaguchi, Japanese assassin of Inejiro Asanuma (d. 1960)
Otoya Yamaguchi (山口 二矢, Yamaguchi Otoya, 22 February 1943 – 2 November 1960) was a Japanese right-wing ultranationalist youth who assassinated Inejirō Asanuma, chairman of the Japan Socialist Party, on 12 October 1960. Yamaguchi rushed the stage and stabbed Asanuma with a wakizashi short sword while Asanuma was participating in a televised election debate at Hibiya Public Hall in Tokyo. Yamaguchi, who was 17 years of age at the time, had been a member of Bin Akao's far-right Greater Japan Patriotic Party, but had resigned earlier that year. After being arrested and interrogated, Yamaguchi committed suicide while in a detention facility.
Yamaguchi became a hero and a martyr to the Japanese far-right, and commemorations in his honor continue to this day. Yamaguchi's actions inspired a number of copycat crimes, including the Shimanaka Incident in 1961, and inspired Nobel Prize-winning novelist Kenzaburō Ōe's novellas Seventeen and Death of a Political Youth. A photograph of the Asanuma assassination taken by Japanese photojournalist Yasushi Nagao is considered one of the most famous press photographs of the 20th century, and won World Press Photo of the Year for 1960 and the 1961 Pulitzer Prize.