Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida performed an impressive flip-flop last Tuesday, stating that he might be able to dissolve a religious corporation after all. The previous day he had insisted that his government lacked a basis for initiating procedures to do that.
The religious corporation in question was the Japanese chapter of the Family Federation for World Peace and Unification, generally known as the Unification Church and widely called the Moonies in reference to its Korean founder, the late Reverend Sun Myung Moon.
Japan’s chapter has come under renewed scrutiny since the fatal shooting of former prime minister Shinzo Abe on July 8. The accused shooter, Tetsuya Yamagami, has told authorities that cult-like pressure from the group on his mother destroyed their family and that he shot Abe because of the latter’s connections with the group.
Yamagami’s mother reportedly gave more than 100 million yen (about US$700,000) to the Family Federation for World Peace and Unification. And reports of other donations under questionable circumstances are multiplying daily.
A hotline set up by the government in September has received more than 1,700 complaints. The alleged misconduct includes such acts as foisting statuettes and other items on members for extravagant prices in “spiritual sales” and, as with Yamagami’s mother, pressuring followers to make huge donations.
Kishida was describing his take on Japan’s Religious Corporations Law. That law entitles the government to revoke a group’s registration as a religious corporation if the group has harmed the public welfare grievously.
Courts have traditionally interpreted the law as predicating the revocation on criminal infringements of Japan’s Penal Code. And Kishida adhered to that interpretation on Monday, October 17. He was responding to a question in a meeting of the budget committee of the Diet’s lower house. He reversed himself the next day in a meeting of the upper house budget committee.
The prime minister attributed the reversal to “further study” of the law. Kishida had realized that breaches of the Civil Code could be sufficient grounds for revoking a religious-corporation registration.
Family ties
Yamagami’s perception of Abe as having close ties with the Family Federation for World Peace and Unification was well founded. In the 1960s, Abe’s grandfather Nobusuke Kishi helped nurture the group in Japan as an ally against communism.
Sun Myung Moon founded the Unification Church in Seoul in 1954. The group began operating in Japan about five years later and received Japanese certification as a religious corporation in 1964. Its present appellation dates from a name change in 2015.
Kishi, an accused but unconvicted war criminal, served as prime minister from 1957 to 1960. He later hosted the Unification Church’s Japanese headquarters in a building next to his home in Tokyo’s Shibuya Ward, a building that had served as his official prime minister’s residence when he was in office.
In 1968, Moon launched the International Federation for Victory over Communism in the Republic of Korea and, as the Kokusai Shokyo Rengo, in Japan. The Japanese chairman was Osami Kuboki, the head of the Japanese branch of the Unification Church, and the honorary chairman was Ryoichi Sasakawa, an ultra-rightist industrialist and former politician.
Sasakawa, like Kishi, was an accused but ultimately unconvicted war criminal and had been a co-occupant of Tokyo’s Sugamo Prison.
Kishi died in August 1987 at the age of 90, and his son-in-law, Shintaro Abe, inherited Kishi’s role as the main interface between Japan’s ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) and the Unification Church. Abe headed the Seiwa Seisaku Kenkyu Kai (Seiwa Kai) faction in the LDP. According to several lawmakers interviewed by the Asahi Shimbun newspaper, he encouraged lawmakers to accept Unification Church support.
Shintaro Abe’s son Shinzo followed him into politics two years after his death by winning a lower house seat in Yamaguchi prefecture. Shinzo joined and later headed the Seiwa Kai faction.
Like his father, he inherited the role of LDP–Unification Church interface. Shinzo fulfilled that role faithfully. He coordinated support from the group for LDP candidates, as noted, and dispatched congratulatory messages to group gatherings by telegram and by pre-recorded video. He appeared several times on the cover of the Kokusai Shokyo Rengo magazine Sekai Shiso.
Two days before the July 10, 2022, upper house election, he was dead.
Difference maker
The positioning of the Family Federation for World Peace and Unification in the motivation of Abe’s alleged killer set off a media frenzy. Investigations by news media and by the political parties themselves soon outed more than 100 politicians, most of them members of the LDP, as having ties with the group.
Among the tainted politicians were numerous present and past government ministers, including former prime ministers. That raised the question as to what sort of quid pro quo was in play between the LDP and the Family Federation for World Peace and Unification.
Media estimates of the votes cast by member of the group range from 70,000 to 150,000. Those figures pale in comparison with the votes wielded by another religious group, Soka Gakkai, in recent elections. The quasi-Buddhist Soka Gakkai claims a membership of 8,270,000 households in Japan, and its political arm, the Komeito party, is the junior partner to the LDP in the ruling coalition.
Komeito mobilized 6,181,432 voters in the House of Councilors (upper house) election held in July, securing seven of the 75 seats up for grabs in the local electoral districts and six of the 50 contested in the national proportional representation block.
Komeito and the LDP cooperate in electoral strategy. They support each other’s candidates, for example, in multi-seat electoral districts where both parties are fielding candidates. And Komeito tends to support the LDP candidate in single-seat districts where it is not fielding a candidate.
The Family Federation for World Peace and Unification, though far smaller than Soka Gakkai/Komeito in electoral clout, also cooperates strategically with the LDP. Its support is a difference maker for some LDP candidates.
That difference-making is especially evident in the proportional block in House of Councilors elections. The nationwide block allows organizations, such as the Family Federation for World Peace and Unification, to leverage their resources by focusing support on individual candidates.
The support from the Family Federation for World Peace and Unification is more than a matter of simply mobilizing member votes. Members turn out to mail postcards by the tens of thousands and to hand out fliers. They also handle the thankless job of placing calls to individuals on voter rolls. A secretary to a Diet member of the Abe faction quoted by Diamond Online described that facet of their electoral contribution:
“Calling the voters on the rolls that we gather and requesting their votes is hugely important in campaign strategy. Ordinary volunteers tend to get demoralized, however, when they keep getting hung up on, scolded, or dragged into interminable diatribes. Recruiting people to do the calling is therefore difficult.
“But the Unification Church folks jump in eagerly. They don’t cut corners. They tackle the calling with enthusiasm. They really have helped us immensely.”
Kid gloves
The furor over LDP links with the Family Federation for World Peace and Unification has called into question anew the LDP’s partnership with Soka Gakkai/Komeito. That has discomfited Komeito members of the Diet. Thus did the Komeito president, Natsuo Yamaguchi, take pains to differentiate Komeito/Soka Gakkai from the Family Federation for World Peace and Unification at a press conference on August 30.
“The problem in question here,” Yamaguchi insisted, “is not a general issue of [the relationship between] politics and religion. It is a problem that pertains [specifically and narrowly] to an organization that has caused concern for society by committing numerous infractions, a problem of the interaction of that organization with politics – with politicians and political parties.”
Although Soka Gakkai might be more law-abiding than the Family Federation for World Peace and Unification, the Soka Gakkai/Komeito amalgam has long raised eyebrows as a contravention of Japan’s constitutional separation of church and state. Soka Gakkai has received far less coverage in Japan’s leading newspapers, however, than that apparent contravention might seem to warrant.
Journalist Taro Maki touched on the media restraint in the October 9 issue of the weekly Sunday Mainichi.
“Soka Gakkai,” Maki wrote, “operated initially as an auxiliary to the Nichiren Shoshu branch of the Nichiren Buddhism sect. Fear of incurring a boycott engendered discretion. Soka Gakkai and Nichiren Shoshu had a falling out that became public in 1977 [and ended in formal rupture in 1991].
“That might have loosened the perceived need for discretion somewhat, but caution still prevails in newsrooms. Soka Gakkai’s 8 million-plus households represent on their own a potent consideration.”
We’ll need to wait and see how serious the government is about dissolving Japan’s Unification Church. Likewise for the question of what if any lasting effect the flood of news about the cult’s sordid history will have – on the mostly LDP politicians who have interacted with the cult, on the LDP’s electoral standing, and on Komeito’s ability to maintain an identity as a legitimate political party.