Under public pressure, the Japanese government filed a request with the Tokyo court on Friday, October 13 to dissolve the Japanese branch of the Unification Church.
This decision made by Prime Minister Fumio Kishida comes in the wake of an investigation launched after former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe (2012-2020) was killed in July 2022. Abe was assassinated due to his links to the church. His death revealed that several members of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) had ties to this church, known officially as the Family Federation for World Peace and Unification.
Minister of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology Masahito Moriyama justified the request for dissolution by accusing the church of coercing its followers to "make donations and purchase goods under conditions that prevented them from making normal decisions, thereby inflicting substantial damage and disturbing peace and tranquillity in life."
The South Korea-based church, founded in 1954 by Sun Myung Moon (1920-2012) with an estimated 600,000 members in Japan, lamented on its website "a significant decision made based on biased information."
Judicial authorities have the legal right to sanction a religious group that has committed an act "clearly established to seriously harm public well-being." Out of Japan's approximately 180,000 religious organizations, only two have been targeted by a dissolution order, resulting in the loss of their status as a religious organization and associated benefits, including tax benefits.
The first organization to be dissolved was the Aum Shinrikyo doomsday cult, which carried out a deadly sarin nerve gas attack on the Tokyo subway in 1995. The second was the Myokakuji group, which was dissolved in 2002 for selling products and services that were supposed to heal followers allegedly possessed by the spirits of aborted fetuses and stillborn babies.
In the case of the Unification Church, the Tokyo court found evidence gathered during the investigation launched in November 2022 after Abe was assassinated. The killer, Tetsuya Yamagami, was said to have acted to avenge his family, which had been ruined by the organization. His mother donated nearly 100 million yen to the church. Yamagami established that Abe was closely tied to the church. Yamagami's actions revealed ties between 180 members of the LDP and the Unification Church, causing significant public outrage and a drop in Prime Minister Kishida's popularity.
Pressured to respond, Japan's government exercised its "right to question" as set out in the Religious Corporations Act. The Japanese Agency for Cultural Affairs posed nearly 600 questions to the organization, particularly concerning its finances. They also analyzed 32 court decisions awarding damages totaling 2.2 billion yen to 169 victims of the Unification Church.
You have 39.49% of this article left to read. The rest is for subscribers only.