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.