The reveal that former Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe was assassinated quickly spread online, and so too was the arrest and name of the assassin. Reportedly, the unemployed 41-year-old Tetsuya Yamagami confessed and claimed it was due to being disappointed and upset with Abe. Other details about Yamagami have since spread online, including his unemployment, his time in the Navy Special Forces, his work at the Medical School on Physiotherapy, and his passion for revolutionary Che Guevara.
However, it is not an image of Tetsuya Yamagami that was shared alongside this information in at least one news station in Greece. It was that of Kojima Productions’ Hideo Kojima. To make matters worse, the misinformation came about from a now-deleted joke by French politician Damien Rieu, who echoed one of the internet's dark, racist jokes about the matter.
Fake profiles, terrible people, and the like shared jokes that Tetsuya Yamagami and Hideo Kojima look alike, a joke made from a racist perspective. Rieu, apparently not realizing it was a joke, shared an image of Kojima with images of Che Guevara—associating the two even more because of these images and Yamagami’s known passion for Guevara. Rieu posted the image alongside a message saying “the extreme left kills.” This comment has since been deleted but was widely spread before so, and during a news station's broadcast about the assassination in Greece, images of Hideo Kojima were used.
While discussing Tetsuya Yamagami’s reported confession as well as details including Guevara, images of Hideo Kojima were shown—mistakenly identifying the Shinzo Abe assassin Yamagami as Hideo Kojima. The entire situation is unfortunate, and many are quite upset about this mistreatment of Kojima's image. He’s completely unrelated to the situation, but internet racists, far-right politicians, and a series of viral posts led to this incident.
After all, this just makes an already bad situation worse. Abe was campaigning for an election in Nara, Nara Prefecture in Japan when he was shot from behind during a speech. Abe was taken to Nara Medical University, where he arrived without any vital signs and would later be declared deceased. The gunman was arrested right after the shooting, with the police reportedly discovering a handmade, double-barreled weapon on his person.
Source: Kotaku