The Moonies in Japan: Religious Cult or Political Inconvenience?

Most Americans know the organization’s followers as the Moonies. In Japan the group is referred to as Sekai Heiwa Toitsu Katei Rengo (Family Federation for World Peace and Unification) or, more commonly, Kyu Toitsu Kyokai (Former Unification Church). Now, however, the religion has no official existence in Japan, despite the lingering name. In October 2023 then-Minister of Education, Culture, Sports, Science, and Technology Moriyama Masahito attended a meeting of the governing body of the Religious Organizations Council and officially announced the Japanese government’s intention to ask the courts to issue a kaisan meirei (dissolution order) against the Unification Church. The courts duly marched to the government’s tune. Subsequent appeals courts upheld the decision, as was also expected. Religious liberty is constitutionally guaranteed in Japan, but, as in other countries, judges here don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows. This March the dissolution order was affirmed, and the Japanese branch of the Moonies was put out of business. They are protesting the order, but the political mood is very strongly against them.

Governmental dissolution of a religious group is rare in Japan. To the government’s credit, believers are mostly left alone. The Moonies are only the fourth instance in the postwar era of a religious body’s being forced to stop operating. In January 2002 the Myokakuji group was dissolved for religious fraud. Before them, the murderous Aum Shinrikyo cult, responsible for sarin gas attacks in the Tokyo subway system in 1995, was forcibly disbanded shortly after that act of terrorism (although it changed its name to Aleph and continues to creep out the population in reconstituted form). Less well known is a group called Dainichizan Hokekyoji, which the government ordered disbanded in 2006 for fraudulent business practices. Given the ostentatious antics of other religious people these past eight decades — the late Ryuho Okawa, for instance, was known for claiming to be an über-god named El Cantare and building ornate temples that clearly indicated he was no stranger to enormous donations from believers — it is remarkable that only four groups have met the government’s wrath.

The Moonies have thus joined a select rogues’ gallery of thoroughly disreputable groups. And yet, there is something notably different about their case. They don’t fit in among the lineup of charlatans and murderers. They are not violent, for one thing. They have been torn to pieces in the Japanese media these past several years, with every fault and alleged offense repeated and magnified by a press corps that — if you can believe it — is even more irresponsible and scandal-mongering than the American “fake news” media. But for all this, I know of no credible allegations of violence. This sets the Moonies apart from Aum Shinrikyo. Also, though believers report having been charged the equivalent of tens of thousands of U.S. dollars for so-called spiritual trade practices (reikan shoho) — prayer sessions and special urns guaranteeing the salvation of deceased loved ones, for example — these practices were greatly curtailed in 2009 when the Unification Church issued an internal directive to stop predatory selling of religious goods and services in Japan. The number of complaints against the group fell off dramatically after that. So, to judge by more recent behavior, the Moonies are not at all like Myokakuji or Dainichizan Hokekyoji.

So, how did it come to this? To my mind, politics, not religion, explains the fate of the Unification Church. It’s not that the government doesn’t like what the Moonies preach. It’s that the government suddenly found the Moonies to be very, very politically inconvenient. For many years, however, things were going well on the political front, too. If anything, the Unification Church in the past decade-plus had become, if not part of the political mainstream, then definitely a solid force in conservative Japanese politics.

The Moonies were not universally beloved, to be sure. Due to their ties to the Korean Peninsula — “Moonies” is a not-too-polite reference to the Rev. Sun Myung Moon (1920-2012), who founded the Holy Spirit Association for the Unification of World Christianity (the forerunner of the Unification Church) in Seoul, South Korea, in 1954 — they tend to take a very different position than other Japanese conservatives on historical disputes with the Republic of Korea. And much of the money that was bilked from the bank accounts of Japanese Moonies found its way into Korean pockets. These things rent deep rifts in the political fabric that otherwise might have bound the Moonies to their conservative brethren in Japan.

East Asian historical differences aside, the Moonies are rock-ribbed on things like anti-communism, support for strong families, and opposition to corrosive ideologies such as homosexualism and transgenderism. I am outspoken on these things, too, and the Unification Church newspaper here, Sekai Nippo, has interviewed me several times. I know Toshiyuki Hayakawa, a reporter and now President and Executive Editor of Sekai Nippo, well. He and the other members I have met have been, without exception, upstanding men and women. We never talk about religion. Our shared goal, in pursuit of which I am happy and proud to work with them, is to protect Japanese society from the horrors of communism and the neo-Marxist predation on children wrapped in a rainbow flag. It’s the same kind of truce one finds among people of different faiths in the United States. Jews, Catholics, Protestants, Muslims, Hindus, and other American believers don’t need to agree on doctrine in order to agree that schools should not encourage kids to “transition” without their parents’ knowledge. Likewise, many conservatives in Japan have long been willing to look the other way regarding religious and historical differences with the Moonies and cooperate with them on repelling poisonous elements from Japanese life.

Japan is not the only place where the followers of Rev. Moon have dived headlong into politics, of course. The anti-communism that Moon and his followers profess proved very helpful to the Reagan administration in the 1980s, for instance. Before that, in the 1970s, America witnessed the outbreak of Koreagate, an intelligence operation targeting not Republicans but Democrats. Behind much of this shadowplay was the South Korean National Intelligence Service, known colloquially as the KCIA. Even today, The Washington Times, owned and supported by the Moonies, is known for its pugilistic political reporting.

The Moonies’ political scheming in Japan, though in many ways as aggressive as it is in the United States, is not why the Unification Church found itself disbanded. It was their financial connections to Japanese politicians that led to their undoing. In July 2022 former prime minister Shinzo Abe was shot dead during a campaign speech on a street corner in Nara, in central Japan. The assailant, we were told, was Tetsuya Yamagami, a loner with a grudge against the Moonies and Abe. Yamagami’s mother allegedly had made big donations to the Unification Church as part of the old reikan shoho habits, driving the family toward financial ruin. Yamagami thought his mother had been duped, and he loathed the Moonies for it, we were told. Abe, in his political capacity, had once made a short video speech thanking the Unification Church for its support. Yamagami, or so the story goes, grew to hate Abe for encouraging the group that preyed on his mother and wrecked his family. When Yamagami supposedly gunned Abe down in Nara three years ago, the media went into a frenzy digging up other connections between Abe’s Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) and the Unification Church. The ties were deep. Abe’s grandfather, Nobusuke Kishi, and a host of other postwar politicians long relied on the Unification Church to help get out the vote on election day. The LDP’s coalition partner, Komeito, is the political arm of the neo-Buddhist movement Soka Gakkai, so voters in Japan were already wary of the LDP’s hidden handholding with religious organizations. As the media would have it, the Moonies were a cult exercising outsized influence on Japanese politics from behind the scenes (and possibly on behalf of a foreign government, South Korea). The year after Abe’s assassination, the LDP was again in hot water, over bribes (dressed up as ticket purchases for political events) to “conservative” politicians. The prime minister at the time, Fumio Kishida, desperate to reverse the LDP’s tanking poll numbers, had to make a show of breaking with the Moonies. They had become a political liability, hence the highly unusual move by the government (under the perennial control of the LDP) ordering the dissolution of the Unification Church. It made the LDP appear serious about reform, and it also got the Moonie monkey off the LDP’s back for the first time since Abe was gunned down in the summer of 2022.

This all hangs together, more or less, as long as you don’t ask too many questions.

At any rate, there things stood in the public record. But I wasn’t sure what to believe. Most people with whom I spoke in Japan were in favor of the kaisan meirei, a view that probably sprang from an understandable distaste for LDP corruption (which is indeed a big and festering problem). And yet the Moonies I knew were still doing the good work that had brought us together. They were still showing up at Sekai Nippo each day, trying to protect Japanese families from LGBT and other anti-human lies. Whatever the group was a decade and a half earlier, it seemed to be walking the straight and narrow now, and in a way beneficial to the country as a whole. If the LDP was really worried about religion in politics, it would have launched an investigation into Soka Gakkai. Targeting the Moonies appears to have been pure hypocrisy, despite the cover story about the LDP’s wanting to set its house in order.

Plus, the story that Yamagami acted alone in killing Abe is almost transparently unbelievable. Yamagami, we were told, had built a makeshift shotgun in a tiny apartment and used it to kill the former prime minister that summer day in Nara. The shotgun, however, looks like a toy, the work of a clueless amateur. It’s true that Yamagami aimed and fired it at Abe, but I doubt the thing would blow a hole in a sliding rice-paper door. Nevertheless, as soon as the shots were fired, Yamagami was whisked away by security forces, never to be seen again. These same security forces had inexplicably allowed Abe to stand on a raised platform in broad daylight with nobody guarding him from behind. We don’t really know what motive, if any, Yamagami gave the police for the killing of which he is accused; his story is entirely secondhand, leaked to the media by the authorities. Three years have passed, and there has been no trial. The Nara Police, meanwhile, are the subject of unflattering rumors. People whisper of the CIA or an inside job. Abe, I believe, was getting too independence-minded for his Washington handlers’ comfort. Pinning Abe’s murder on Yamagami — and, by extension, on the Moonies — was a convenient way to distract voters from much bigger political problems in Japan, namely, the country’s being a virtual colony of the United States.

In other words, something is off about the Abe-Yamagami-Moonies business. But there’s even more to the story than the political twists involving the LDP. In early 2025 my friend Mr. Hayakawa, the reporter, sent me a book Sekai Nippo had just published. Religious Freedom Under Threat: Japan in the Time of the Assassination of Former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe is the title in English gloss. At 210 pages, it is a highly readable account of the travails of the Unification Church from an inside-the-organization perspective. It introduces facts that have changed my mind about the way the Japanese government has treated the Moonies. Say what you will about what the Moonies believe. I, too, have no truck with their spiritual commitments. But as an organization, the Unification Church has been subjected to a level of viciousness its followers simply do not deserve. Error has no rights, perhaps, but human beings do have dignity, and the Moonies are not somehow an exception, a group that warrants whatever pogroms a ruling class can impose on them.

Take, for instance, the outrageous bias on the part of the Japanese media. As the book lays out, commentators and Moonies’ victims’ lawyers crowded the airwaves after Abe’s shooting and the subsequent fallout over the LDP’s ties to the Unification Church. As could easily be guessed, these “experts” lambasted the Moonies, cranking the rhetoric up to way past inflammatory with each new appearance. But there are many people, including current church members, who are speaking up in defense of their beliefs and the good social work the church does. These believers, regular people who seem sincerely to believe in what the Unification Church teaches, are not evil or up to no good. Their religious beliefs, although badly skewed by the out-there theology of Rev. Moon, are not what is at issue here. Yes, at the creedal level, the Moonies are open to stringent criticism. But believers and belief must be separated. Being in the wrong religion is not an invitation to ruin someone’s life. Moonies are just people of faith who are caught in a disaster none of them asked for or expected. Not surprisingly, they are almost never invited onto talk shows.

The media here has squelched the voices of these believers. Worse, it has silenced reports of Moonies who were kidnapped and detained, some for more than a decade, by professional faith-breakers (dakkaiya) who specialize in torturing people until they vow never to set foot in a Unification Church building again. These dakkaiya are not Japanese-mafioso yakuza types with scars down their cheeks. They are regular-looking, late-middle-aged men. They go on television programs and spew outright hatred for the Moonies. They are also guilty of what are, by any definition, heinous crimes. In the early 1990s there were more than 350 cases each year of abductions and forced imprisonment of Unification Church members. These dakkaiya dragged Moonies off the street and locked them in a room somewhere. One Moonie, Toru Goto, was kidnapped and detained in an apartment in downtown Tokyo for more than 4,500 days. If you were a television producer, dear reader, would you invite unrepentant kidnappers onto your show? Wouldn’t you at least raise the issue of kidnapping and detention as something relevant in the media’s Moonie narrative?

There’s more to the story than even these big wrinkles. A little research revealed that Bitter Winter, an excellent organization that speaks out against religious oppression in the People’s Republic of China, has denounced the dakkaiya and come out in favor of the Unification Church’s freedom of worship. Others, including academics and commentators in Japan and elsewhere, have raised their voices in defense of the Moonies’ constitutional and human right to believe as they wish. Some politicians are speaking out, too. My colleague Kenji Yoshida and I interviewed Satoshi Hamada, a member of the National Diet, earlier this year. Hamada is featured in the book. To the best of my knowledge, he is the only member of the national assembly to raise the alarm about a government that puts religious groups out of business when they become political liabilities for the ruling party. Buddhist monks, too, are speaking up in defense of the Moonies. Yet, to hear the talking heads tell it, the world is united in contempt for the Unification Church. The truth is much more complicated.

Some believers have been threatened with violence and death for staying in the church. The mainstream media here have ignored almost all of this, too. Believers are “brainwashed,” they say. They are the victims of “mind control.” Underneath this rhetoric is a strong current of disdain among those in the media-government-academic complex for religion of any kind. The glee with which newscasters pile on the Unification Church and its members doesn’t make sense unless you understand that the cultural elite in Japan are dismissive of anything that runs counter to materialistic determinism. If you want to know why the media and professor types in Japan really hate the Moonies, you have to take a few steps back and see just how spiritually vacuous the ruling class here has become. Runaway liberalism in the postwar era, ginned up during the Occupation by American New Deal zealots and now kept stoked by homegrown Japanese liberals, frames religion as something scary, a back door into antisocial behavior. The current prime minister, Shigeru Ishiba, is a Christian, a fact the media treat as a baffling curiosity. Open religious commitment on the part of politicians, entertainers, or other public figures is extremely rare. Some television personalities are part of Soka Gakkai, a fact that reinforces the notion that religion is a bizarre and somewhat dangerous pastime with which regular people should not be associated. The media seemed to relish the opportunity to attack all religions by proxy as they were piling on the Moonies and treating them as a shadowy group of scoundrels and cult victims in need of “deprogramming.” If anything, politicians, with the exception of Ishiba and a few others, are even worse. They cynically use religious organizations as part of machine politics but probably find the content of their belief ridiculous. The New Dealers who passed these kinds of attitudes off as the vanguard of a new world order would have been thrilled to see how well their work succeeded.

Religious Freedom Under Threat: Japan in the Time of the Assassination of Former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe is, of course, in Japanese (its title is Obiyakasareru shinkyo no jiyu: Abe moto shusho ansatsugo no Nihon). But I encourage those who can access the book to do so. The story it tells is well worth serious thought by anyone of sincere belief of any kind. To boil the argument down to its sociopolitical dimension: If someone decides your religion is a cult or a political convenience or both (and this may already be the case), should politicians be able to decide whether your beliefs are acceptable to the body politic? To put it bluntly: Should professional sinners (taking bribes is but the least of politicians’ many vicious talents, in Japan and elsewhere) get to draw the line between what is sacred and what is profane? American politicians often claim to have found religion. In truth, I think most of them just find religion politically useful and are happy to drop the hammer on a group that no longer votes the right way on election day. It’s best not to make a deal with the devil in the first place, and to keep faith as far away from political interference as possible.

As for me, I’m sticking by my friends in the Unification Church. They’re good people. This is a fallen world, and we must use good judgment if we want to try to make it even a little better. I am standing by the Moonies, not just because the government’s target tomorrow may well be me and my Church, although that is certainly a valid worry. I stand with them because putting political expediency above human beings is an evil thing to do under any circumstances. And also because, as I’ve rediscovered anew through the Unification Church saga, the halls of power are manned by inveterate liars. Speaking out, even — especially — when it’s unpopular, is something we could use a lot more of, in Japan and everywhere else.

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