A controversial South Korean church with highly effective political connections faces dissolution in Japan after a Tokyo court ordered a revokation of its authorized standing after the authorities accused it of manipulative fundraising and recruitment techniques that sowed concern amongst followers and harmed their households.
The Tokyo District court’s ruling would finish the Unification Church’s tax-exempt standing in Japan and power it to liquidate its property. The church stated it is contemplating a direct attraction to the nation’s highest court.
The Unification Church has confronted lots of of lawsuits in Japan from households who say that it manipulated members into draining their financial savings to make donations, however for many years it largely escaped official scrutiny and maintained shut hyperlinks with the governing Liberal Democratic Party.
That modified in 2022, when former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe was assassinated. The man accused of capturing Abe allegedly was motivated by the former prime minister’s hyperlinks to the church and blamed it for bankrupting his household. The killing drew public consideration and prompted investigations into the church’s practices and its hyperlinks to highly effective politicians.
The church was based in Seoul in 1954, a yr after the finish of the Korean War, by the late Rev. Sun Myung Moon, the self-proclaimed messiah who preached new interpretations of the Bible and conservative, family-oriented worth programs.
The church, which formally calls itself the Family Federation for World Peace and Unification, champions anti-communism and the unification of the Korean Peninsula, which has been break up between the totalitarian North and democratic South.
The church is maybe greatest recognized for mass weddings the place it paired off {couples}, usually from completely different international locations, and renewed the vows of these already married, at locations like stadiums and gymnasiums. The group is stated to have a international membership of thousands and thousands, together with lots of of 1000’s in Japan.
The church confronted accusations in the Seventies and ’80s of utilizing devious recruitment techniques and brainwashing adherents into turning over enormous parts of their salaries to Moon. The church has denied the allegations, saying many new spiritual actions face related accusations of their early years.
Experts say Japanese followers are requested to pay for sins dedicated by their ancestors throughout Japan’s 1910-1945 colonial rule of the Korean Peninsula, and that the majority of the church’s worldwide funding comes from Japan.
The Unification Church is the first spiritual group to face a revocation order underneath Japan’s civil code. Two earlier case concerned prison fees — the Aum Shinrikyo doomsday cult, which carried out a sarin nerve gasoline assault on the Tokyo subway system, and Myokakuji group, whose executives had been convicted of fraud.
Shinzo Abe murderer and Unification Church
The 2022 assassination of former Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and subsequent investigations unearthed a long time of cozy ties between the Unification Church and Japan’s governing Liberal Democratic Party and triggered public outrage.
The man accused of capturing Abe at a marketing campaign occasion allegedly instructed police he was motivated by the former prime minister’s hyperlinks to the church, which he stated bankrupted his household attributable to his mom’s extreme donations.
Abe was recognized for his arch-conservative views on safety and historical past points and appeared at occasions organized by church associates.
Throughout his life, Moon labored to make his church into a worldwide spiritual motion and develop its enterprise and charitable actions. Moon was convicted of tax evasion in 1982 and served a jail time period in New York. He died in 2012.
The church has developed relations with conservative world leaders together with U.S. presidents Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush and extra not too long ago Donald Trump.
Moon additionally had ties with North Korea’s founder Kim Il Sung, the late grandfather of present ruler Kim Jong Un.
Moon stated in his autobiography that he requested Kim to surrender his nuclear ambitions, and that Kim responded that his atomic program was for peaceable functions and he had no intention to make use of it to “kill (Korean) compatriots.”
Published – March 25, 2025 03:18 pm IST
