The Tokyo District Court on Tuesday ordered the dissolution of the Unification Church, the influential cult linked to the 2022 assassination of former prime minister Abe Shinzo.
The court’s stated reasons for ordering the Unification Church to dissolve were financial irregularities and the group’s extremely aggressive solicitation of donations from its followers. The suspect arrested in Abe’s death, Yamagami Tetsuya, said he was distraught over his mother bankrupting their family with massive donations to the church. He targeted Abe because he believed the former prime minister was “deeply connected with the Unification Church.”
The Unification Church — formally rebranded in 1994 as the Family Federation for World Peace and Unification, and colloquially known to its detractors as the “Moonies” — was founded in 1954 by an excommunicated South Korean Presbyterian cleric named Sun Myung Moon. Moon claimed he received a divine vision that instructed him to complete the work of Jesus Christ by unifying the human race in peace.
The Unification Church became infamous in the 1970s for its cult programming, mass weddings, and aggressive looting of its followers. It rebranded itself in the 1990s to escape this stigma, but critics said the organization had not truly changed much.
Less well-known until fairly recently is that the Unification Church became very influential and well-connected in Japan, including extensive ties to Abe’s Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), which has been the governing party in Japan almost continuously for 70 years.
Yamagami was one of hundreds of Japanese who claim their family members were brainwashed by the Unification Church and manipulated into giving it much of their family fortunes. Law enforcement officials say the church was exceptionally good at extracting money from Japanese victims because it told them they were making spiritual restitution for Imperial Japan’s brutal occupation of the Korean Peninsula in World War II.
In the wake of Abe’s assassination, then-Prime Minister Kishida Fumio grappled with an enormous scandal over LDP connections to the Unification Church, as well as fundraising issues. A government investigation conducted during this time of scandal found that 179 of the 379 sitting lawmakers from the LDP had connections with the church.
The court case that led to Tuesday’s dissolution order began in October 2023, when the Japanese Education Ministry requested action against the Unification Church for its manipulative and predatory practices against its followers.
Under the Japanese system, the Education Ministry oversees religious organizations. A law known as the Religious Corporations Law allows courts to dissolve religious groups which engage in “conduct that is clearly deemed to be in violation of laws and regulations and extremely detrimental to the public welfare.”
The Education Ministry submitted thousands of pieces of evidence to the court, identifying about 1,550 victims who suffered a combined 20.4 billion yen ($137 million) in damages.
If the order is not successfully appealed, the Unification Church will become the first religious group in Japan to lose its tax-exempt status in a civil court case. Other infamous examples of banned cults in Japan were forced to dissolve after criminal convictions, most famously including the Aum Shinrikyo doomsday cult, which conducted a terrorist attack with sarin gas on the Tokyo subway system in 1995.
Coincidentally, the 30th anniversary of the Aum Shinrikyo attack was just five days before the court ruling against the Unification Church.
The Tokyo District Court also ordered the Unification Church to liquidate its assets, but it did not technically ban the church from proselytizing in Japan. The Unification Church nevertheless said it would appeal the court ruling as a violation of its religious freedom.
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