Hashida Tatsuo struggled to hold back tears as he vented pent-up anger at a controversial church he says ruined his family.
His wife became a follower of the South Korea-based Unification Church about 30 years ago, Mr. Hashida explained during a recent meeting with opposition lawmakers in Tokyo. His wife was told there were “evil spirits” in the family’s rice field on the island of Shikoku, which she later sold and donated the money to the church. In total, Mr. Hashida says she gave them about 100 million yen, or $678,000.
“Why did an ordinary family have to do this for the sake of the Unification Church?” asked the farmer.
He and his wife, still an active member of the church, divorced about nine years ago. Their adult son died by suicide in 2020.
Throughout all this, Mr. Hashida approached police, lawyers, and local government officials for help. “But nobody would listen,” he said.
Japanese society is now listening to Mr. Hashida and other victims after the assassination of former premier Abe Shinzo in July broke a decades-long taboo, and exposed the ruling party’s cozy relations with the church, which critics call a cult. Since the shooting, ties between members of the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) and the church have emerged, and approval ratings plummeted, as the public calls into question the integrity of the government.
As Prime Minister Kishida Fumio tries to contain the crisis, even ordering a first-of-its-kind investigation into the church, some voters say the controversy has them reevaluating how they pick their leaders.
“In the next elections, we need to be more careful about who we vote for and what kind of background candidates have,” says Kaneko Mitsuhiro, a small business owner in Tokyo.
A longstanding relationship
The LDP’s ties with the church, known officially as Family Federation for World Peace and Unification, trace back to the 1960s. Prime Minister Kishi Nobusuke, Mr. Abe’s grandfather, developed a friendship with Sun Myung Moon, who founded the church in 1954 and shared the Japanese leader’s staunch anti-Communist stance. That relationship helped the organization establish itself in Japan.
While the church has also been active in other countries, Japan is the only nation that sees victims of its “spiritual sales,” in which followers are pressured to buy items like jars and beads at exorbitant prices to supposedly free them from bad ancestral karma, according to the National Network of Lawyers Against Spiritual Sales. Followers were also told to pay for their ancestors’ war crimes committed during Japan’s colonial rule on the Korean Peninsula from 1910 to 1945, says Yamaguchi Hiroshi, one of the lawyers who leads the network.
From 1987 to 2021, lawyers and the National Consumer Affairs Center of Japan have received nearly 35,000 complaints concerning such sales, according to the network.
As for political ties, church officials argue they have not asked followers to support any specific party, but they are willing to support lawmakers who have an anti-Communist stance.
For some politicians – including Mr. Abe’s younger brother and former Defense Minister Kishi Nobuo, as well as LDP policy chief Hagiuda Koichi, who was Mr. Abe’s right-hand man – that means followers, widely known as “Moonies” though they refer to themselves as “Unificationists,” volunteered to work on election campaigns. According to journalist Suzuki Eito, who has covered the Unification Church for more than a decade, some LDP lawmakers also received monetary donations from Church-affiliated groups.
Meanwhile, LDP lawmakers’ involvement in church activities have helped boost Unificationists’ credibility, Mr. Yamaguchi says. Indeed, his group had repeatedly urged Mr. Abe to refrain from attending events organized by the church and its affiliates, but their pleas were dismissed.
In September 2019, Mr. Abe appeared in a video message aired at a church event, paying his respects to the church’s leadership and followers for their “efforts toward conflict resolution around the world, especially the peaceful unification of the Korean Peninsula.”
From open secret to political crisis
This summer, the church and LDP’s intertwined history was thrust into the spotlight when Yamagami Tetsuya, suspected gunman in the Abe shooting, told police that he resented the former prime minister for his links to the church, which he blamed for destroying his family.
Fukumoto Nobuya, a lawyer for the church, has confirmed Mr. Yamagami’s mother made “excessive donations” amounting to more than 100 million yen.
Soon after, an internal LDP survey showed 179 of its 379 national lawmakers had some connections with the church, for which Mr. Kishida apologized and vowed to sever relations between the party and the church. But public opinion continued to plunge as more interactions between the church and LDP heavyweights, including House Speaker Hosoda Hiroyuki, surfaced.
According to a Jiji Press poll, the approval rating of Mr. Kishida’s cabinet plummeted to the record low of 27% in October from 50% in July. Rising prices without wage growth, and the premier’s decision to hold a state funeral for Mr. Abe in September despite strong public opposition, also contributed to the sharp fall, analysts say.
And the connections keep coming. Economic Revitalization Minister Yamagiwa Daishiro was forced to step down in late October after a 2019 photo emerged of him and Hak Ja Han, the current church president and widow of Mr. Moon, standing side by side. Until the photo surfaced, the minister had evaded the issue, insisting he had “no recollection” of his involvement in the organization’s events.
To calm the waters, Mr. Kishida has taken the highly unusual step of ordering an investigation into the Unification Church. Depending on the outcome, it could be deprived of its tax-exempt status.
Education Minister Nagaoka Keiko announced on Friday that authorities will complete initial questioning by year-end, marking the first time the government has utilized its right to question a religious organization under the Religious Corporations Law. The full probe may take much longer.
Mr. Hashida and ex-followers who want the church to be dissolved view Mr. Kishida’s decision as a “step forward,” though some critics have called it a “stall tactic.”
Hard look at Japan’s institutions
The crisis has not only cast doubt on the integrity of the LDP, but also other institutions that have failed to scrutinize the church’s political influence.
Some argue that Japan’s major news organizations have largely failed to report on the authorities’ long-standing ties with the church.
“The LDP should no longer exist as a political party because it utilized the Unification Church for its election campaigns,” says Asano Kenichi, a former journalism professor at Doshisha University in Kyoto, adding that journalists must continue investigating the LDP and Unification Church. Through their reporting, he hopes the media can help improve government integrity, as well as establish a higher standard of journalism that “the public can trust, whose main duty is to serve as a watchdog on power.”
Others attribute this crisis in part to a lack of clarity about the role religion should play in Japanese law and society.
A group of 25 religion scholars from across the country issued a statement saying Japan “needs to develop a clear understanding of the whole concept of religion and the relationship between religion and politics,” and calling on the government to “provide a prompt and appropriate response through a transparent process to prevent more victims.”
That’s one area where there now seems to be broad agreement – that Japan’s government has been failing the people who’ve watched their families deteriorate while pumping money into the Unification Church. Since establishing a victim hotline on Sept. 5, the government’s received more than 3,800 calls, mostly from ex-Unificationists and concerned relatives.
While the forward momentum is inspiring hope, many are left wondering why it took so long.
“That the problems had not come to light for decades is a big issue in its own right,” says Kimura Sou, a lawyer in Tokyo. “Police and government officials had duly hesitated to deal with it because they thought it was a religious matter. I believe that attitude was fostered by the fact that lawmakers received support from the church and that some lawmakers even … seemed to give endorsement to the organization.”
“The government should have offered a helping hand to those in trouble with the church,” he adds.
