A court in Japan has ordered the Unification church to be dissolved after a government request spurred by the investigation into the 2022 assassination of the former prime minister Shinzo Abe.
The church, founded in South Korea and nicknamed the “Moonies” after its late founder, Sun Myung Moon, is accused of pressuring followers into making life-ruining donations, and blamed for child neglect among its members, although it has denied any wrongdoing.
The church said it was considering an immediate appeal against the Tokyo district court’s revocation of its legal status, which would take away its tax-exempt privilege and require liquidation of its assets.
The order followed a request by Japan’s education ministry in 2023 to dissolve the influential South Korea-based sect, citing manipulative fundraising and recruitment tactics that sowed fear among followers and harmed their families.
The Japanese branch of the church had criticised the request as a serious threat to religious freedom and the human rights of its followers.
The church called the court order regrettable and unjust and said in a statement that the court’s decision was based on “a wrong legal interpretation and absolutely unacceptable”.
The investigation into Abe’s assassination revealed decades of cosy ties between the church and Japan’s governing Liberal Democratic party. The church obtained legal status as a religious organisation in Japan in the 1960s during an anti-communist movement supported by Abe’s grandfather, the former prime minister Nobusuke Kishi.
The man accused of killing Abe resented the church and blamed it for his family’s financial troubles.
The church, which officially calls itself the Family Federation for World Peace and Unification, is the first religious group subject to a revocation order under Japan’s civil code. Two earlier cases involved criminal charges: the Aum Shinrikyo doomsday cult, which carried out a sarin nerve gas attack on the Tokyo subway system; and Myokakuji group, whose executives were convicted of fraud.
Seeking the church’s dissolution, the education ministry submitted 5,000 documents and pieces of evidence to the court, based on interviews with more than 170 people.
The church used manipulative tactics to make its followers buy expensive goods and donate beyond their means, causing fear, harm and seriously deviating from the law on religious groups, officials and experts said.
The cultural affairs agency said the settlements reached in or outside court exceeded 20bn yen (£103m) and involved more than 1,500 people.
The church, founded in Seoul in 1954, a year after the end of the Korean war, by Moon, a self-proclaimed messiah who preached new interpretations of the Bible and conservative, family-oriented value systems.
It developed relations with conservative world leaders including the US president, Donald Trump, as well as his predecessors Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan and George HW Bush.
The church faced accusations in the 1970s and 1980s of using devious recruitment tactics and brainwashing adherents into turning over huge portions of their salaries to Moon. In Japan, the group has faced lawsuits for offering “spiritual merchandise” that allegedly caused members to buy expensive art and jewellery or sell their real estate to raise money for the church.
The church has acknowledged excessive donations, but says the problem has lessened since the group stepped up compliance in 2009.
Experts say Japanese followers are asked to pay for sins committed by their ancestors during Japan’s 1910-45 colonial rule of the Korean peninsula, and that most of the church’s worldwide funding comes from Japan.
Source: www.theguardian.com