Japan moves to strip Unification Church of tax-protected status after Shinzo Abe assassination

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More than a year after Shinzo Abe was murdered by a man allegedly incensed by the former Japanese prime minister’s links to the Unification Church, Tokyo applied this week to strip the group of its tax-protected status.

Japan’s Ministry of Culture sought a court order Friday to dissolve the Unification Church as a religious corporation, which would severely limit its operations in the country but not ban it completely. In a statement, the church’s global body said it was “appalled” by the government’s decision, which it called a clear case of “religious discrimination.”

Founded by South Korean pastor Sun Myung Moon in 1954, the Unification Church claims about 10 million followers globally, with some 600,000 in Japan, a country of more than 125 million people. Its Japanese offices are in a nondescript, three-storey building tucked down a side street in Shibuya, a busy shopping district in Tokyo.

But the group’s apparently modest footprint belies its outsized political influence. Beginning in the 1960s, the stridently anti-communist church cultivated ties with Japan’s ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), including with Mr. Abe’s grandfather and father, both former prime ministers. According to former members, followers were told who to vote for at election time and provided free canvassing and other support for LDP candidates.

The Moonies, as the sect is known, also engaged in highly controversial fundraising tactics, allegedly coercing followers into making donations or purchasing church materials. Mr. Abe’s assassin, Tetsuya Yamagami, said his mother had been bankrupted by the church’s frequent demands for money and blamed it for a breakdown in their relationship. He told investigators he had originally hoped to kill a senior church official, before deciding to target Mr. Abe.

Masahito Moriyama, Japan’s Culture Minister, said the Unification Church “has impinged on people’s freedoms for a long time, prevented them from making sound decisions, severely hurt them and disrupted their lives.”

“They forced many people, including their relatives, to make sacrifices financially and mentally,” he told reporters, adding that an advisory panel had interviewed more than 170 people connected to the church and traced damages of at least 2.2 billion yen, or $20-million. The panel unanimously approved dissolving the church’s religious corporation after concluding its actions were illegal and significantly harmful to public welfare.

The Japanese government has been pressured to act against the church after it emerged just how enmeshed the LDP was with the Moonies, with 179 lawmakers admitting to having dealings with the church. Speaking this week, Prime Minister Fumio Kishida – whose approval rating collapsed as a result of the scandal – promised to ensure that members of his party would have no further ties to the group.

There are dozens of Unification Church ministries across Japan, and the organization has significant investments in media, schools, ginseng production, real estate and fishing operations. Donations from Japan are a major source of revenue for the global church, which is headquartered in the United States and now run by Mr. Moon’s widow, Hak Ja Han.

In a statement, the church’s Japanese arm said it had operated for decades “with the dream of realizing world peace through an ideal family centred on God.” But the assassination of Mr. Abe “changed everything,” leading to “media coverage that made us look like monsters of ‘absolute evil.’ ”

Only two other organizations have been dissolved under the Religious Corporations Act: the doomsday Aum Shinrikyo cult, which carried out the 1995 sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway, and the Myokakuji temple group, which was accused of defrauding members.

Aum Shinrikyo – whose leader, Shoko Asahara, was executed in 2018 along with 12 other members – regrouped under the name Aleph and continues to operate today, albeit under tight government scrutiny.

The Unification Church may be able to pull off something similar. But the scandal has severely damaged its reputation in Japan and already put a dampener on fundraising.

Jeffrey Hall, a special lecturer in Japanese studies at Japan’s Kanda University of International Studies, said the dissolution order would be “far from a death blow to the church.”

“It’s actually significantly less damaging than the steps the government took against Aum,” he said. “The Unification Church’s leadership is not going to jail, and most of its financial assets are outside of Japan.”

Losing its status would inflict financial damage, Mr. Hall added, but such an outcome has been expected by the church’s leadership for months, and “there’s no reason to believe it won’t be able to resume its activities with most of its support base intact.”

Some Japanese lawmakers have expressed concerns that dissolving the church’s religious corporation could enable it to transfer its assets to another body in order to avoid paying out lawsuits currently being pursued against it. They have promised to introduce legislation to stop this.

Members of the Unification Church in Japan have complained of discrimination and even threats since Mr. Abe’s assassination. Demian Dunkley, the president of the church’s U.S. body, said in a statement that he is imploring “the Japanese people to look at the impact this is having on real people, their own people.”