The shooting of former Prime Minister Abe Shinzo rocked Japan. While the role of the former Unification Church has come to the fore, there are increasing calls for looking at Japanese society, to help understand why a man's pent-up anger exploded in violence. In her books, the writer Takamura Kaoru has examined authority from the perspective of downtrodden people. Political scientist Nakajima Takeshi has studied the 2008 Akihabara mass killing in Tokyo and prewar assassinations of political leaders. Literature scholar Robert Campbell has analyzed social network postings and written about the relationship between language and democracy. In three long interviews, we search for pathways through the future.