When Shinzo Abe, the longest-serving prime minister in Japanese history, was assassinated at a campaign event earlier this year, world leaders expressed their profound shock, anger and grief.
Mr Abe’s sudden death was one among the world leaders, visionaries, inventors and business moguls who died this year.
Each made their mark on history.
Shinzo Abe
Mr Abe was shot twice on a street in Nara on July 8 by Tetsuya Yamagami, an unemployed 41-year-old.
Mr Abe, aged 67, died in hospital.
Mr Abe held office in 2006 for a year and then again from 2012 to 2020, before resigning due to health reasons.
More than 6000 people attended the funeral, including former US president Barack Obama and French President Emmanuel Macron.
European Council president Charles Michel decried the “cowardly” attack on Mr Abe, whom he called “a true friend” and a “fierce defender of multilateral order and democratic values”.
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese stated it was Mr Abe’s vision “that helped elevate our bilateral relationship to a Special Strategic Partnership in 2014” and that under his leadership “Japan emerged as one of Australia’s closest and most like-minded partners in Asia”.
“Under Mr Abe’s leadership, Australia and Japan deepened our economic ties, defence co-operation and people to people links, he was deeply committed to furthering relations between our two countries,” Mr Albanese said.
Mikhail Gorbachev
The former head of the USSR, Mikhail Gorbachev, died on August 30, leaving behind one of the most influential and most controversial legacies of the 21st century.
Mr Gorbachev, who ended the Cold War without bloodshed but failed to prevent the collapse of the Soviet Union, died aged 91.
But Mr Gorbachev saw that legacy wrecked in the final months of his life, as Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine brought Western sanctions crashing down on Moscow, and politicians in Russia and the West began to speak openly of a new cold war.
As the last Soviet president, he forged arms reduction deals with the US and partnerships with Western powers to remove the Iron Curtain that divided Europe since World War II and brought about the reunification of Germany.
Mr Gorbachev won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1990.
US President Joe Biden said Mr Gorbachev was “a man of remarkable vision”.
“He believed in glasnost and perestroika – openness and restructuring – not as mere slogans, but as the path forward for the people of the Soviet Union after so many years of isolation and deprivation,” he said.
Herb Kohler Jr
Herb Kohler Jr was an American billionaire businessman who died on September 3 aged 83.
He was the head of his family’s global plumbing empire.
The third generation to helm the Wisconsin company, Mr Kohler was chief executive for 43 years and later as its executive chairman.
Kohler was heir to the company’s fortune and last year, it reported $8 billion in revenue.
“[He] built a century-old family business known for bathtubs, toilets and faucets into a multibillion-dollar global enterprise and turned a tiny company town into an unlikely stop for the world’s top golfers,” wrote The New York Times.
He was a described as a man of vision and gusto.
Tulsi Tanti
Tulsi Tanti was India’s renewable energy pioneer, founding green energy group Suzlon with his brothers in 1995.
Considered a founding father of wind power in India, he was a billionaire by the mid-2000s.
Despite poor-quality turbines being produced and a fall in stock prices, in latter years the company re-established itself under the country’s commitments to green energy targets.
Dorli Rainey
Dorli Rainey was an Austrian-born American activist who rose to prominence in the early days of the Occupy Wall Street protest in 2011.
She was 84 at the time, and was pepper-sprayed as police tried to clear the crowd of protesters and her photo quickly became a symbol of the protest movement.
She joined demonstrations for racial justice and affordable housing.
“This is what democracy looks like,” Ms Rainey, who often referred to herself as an “old lady in combat boots,” told The Stranger, an alternative weekly newspaper in Seattle, soon after the episode, reported the New York Times.
She died aged 95.
Acknowledgments
- John Y Brown Jr, a former governor of Kentucky, died aged 88 on November 22. Governor Brown helped build Kentucky Fried Chicken into a fast-food juggernaut. He would go on to leverage his name recognition into a successful bid for governor, leading the state from 1979 to 1983
- Political scientist and US diplomat Madeleine Albright was the first female US Secretary of State. She died on March 23, aged 84
- Clyde Bellecourt was a leader in the Native American struggle for civil rights and a founder of the American Indian Movement. He died on January 11
- Dr Paul Farmer was a US physician, humanitarian and author renowned for providing health care to millions of impoverished people worldwide and who co-founded the global nonprofit Partners in Health. He died on February 21, aged 62.
- Alan Ladd Jr was Oscar-winning producer and studio boss at 20th Century Fox who greenlit Star Wars. He died on March 2, aged 84
- Autherine Lucy Foster was the first Black student to enrol at the University of Alabama. She died on March 2, aged 92.
