Prime Minister Fumio Kishida mentioned on Thursday that the federal government would search to dissolve the Japan department of the perimeter Unification Church, greater than a yr after the group’s in depth ties to conservative Japanese politicians had been revealed within the wake of former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s assassination.
After Mr. Abe, Japan’s longest-serving prime minister, was killed at a marketing campaign occasion in Nara, close to Kyoto, in July 2022, particulars emerged that the suspect within the homicide, Tetsuya Yamagami, had held a grievance in opposition to Mr. Abe for his perceived ties to the Unification Church.
Mr. Yamagami wrote to a blogger who lined the church that his mom, a longtime member, had bankrupted the household by making substantial donations to the group in opposition to their needs.
Lawmakers scurried to include the political fallout and commenced to scrutinize the church, which was discovered to have manipulated members over a number of many years into handing over massive sums of cash.
The authorities had been contemplating for weeks whether or not to ask a court docket to strip the church, based in South Korea by the Rev. Sun Myung Moon and recognized for its mass weddings, of its official non secular standing in Japan.
Mr. Kishida informed reporters in Tokyo on Thursday that legislators in his conservative Liberal Democratic Party had been slicing ties with the church since Mr. Abe’s dying.
In a news convention, Masahito Moriyama, the minister answerable for schooling, tradition, sports activities, science and expertise, mentioned that most of the church’s followers had suffered monetary and psychological hurt.
“The sect has continuously and over a long period of time restricted the free decision-making of many of its followers,” Mr. Moriyama mentioned. Members would “make donations and purchase goods under conditions that prevented them from making normal decisions, thereby inflicting substantial damage and disturbing peace and tranquillity in life.”
Mr. Moriyama mentioned his ministry would file a request with the Tokyo district court docket as early as Friday to abolish the church in Japan.
He mentioned the federal government had tracked 32 court docket selections awarding damages totaling 2.2 billion yen (about $14.7 million) to 169 victims of the Unification Church.
In an announcement on its web site, the church protested the federal government’s transfer.
“It’s extremely regrettable that the Japanese government made such an important decision based on unbalanced information from a left-leaning lawyers group that was founded under the objective of destroying our group,” the assertion mentioned.
This week, the church submitted a petition to the cultural affairs company signed by greater than 80,000 individuals who protested the federal government’s dissolution effort.
After Mr. Abe’s assassination shined a lightweight on the Unification Church’s political actions in Japan, an inside investigation by the Liberal Democratic Party found that 180 lawmakers had had some interplay with the church, starting from giving speeches at its conferences to receiving organized assist from it throughout elections.
The connections angered some within the Japanese public, which started to sympathize with Mr. Yamagami and his household’s plight, seeing in him a logo of different susceptible individuals who had been preyed upon by the church’s requests for donations.
In its assertion, the church mentioned that it had operated in Japan since 1964 and was working towards “the dream of realization of world peace.”
“What changed everything was the assassination of Prime Minister Abe in July last year,” the group mentioned. “We haven’t changed from what we were before that. Despite that fact, the environment surrounding our group changed like a roller coaster and we came to realize that we were treated as a monster of definite evil by the media.”
Japanese courts have beforehand ordered the dissolution of church or cult teams in uncommon instances. In 1996, the Supreme Court ordered the breakup of Aum Shinrikyo, the cult that organized a terrorist assault with sarin fuel within the Tokyo subway in 1995, killing 13 individuals and injuring 1000’s.
If the Tokyo district court docket orders the Unification Church to dissolve in Japan, the church will lose its property tax exemption and must get rid of its belongings. The church may enchantment to the Supreme Court or take its actions underground.
The church has a presence in scores of nations, although membership figures are arduous to estimate.
Source: www.nytimes.com