Abe suspect bore familiar grudge
Unification Church has controversial presence in Japan
TOKYO — The day before Shinzo Abe was assassinated, Tetsuya Yamagami sent a letter saying that the Unification Church had ruined his life, “destroying my family and driving it into bankruptcy.”
Yamagami’s mother had been a member of the church for more than two decades, making prodigious donations over her family’s objections. “It’s no exaggeration to say that my experience with it during that time continues to distort my whole life,” he wrote to a blogger who covered the church. Japanese police have confirmed that he sent the letter.
The next day, Abe was dead, shot at close range with an improvised gun while campaigning in the city of Nara, Japan.
Police have charged Yamagami with murder, saying he was angry at a “certain group” and decided to target Abe, the former prime minister of Japan. Authorities haven’t named the group, but a Unification Church spokesperson said that Yamagami was most likely referring to them. It remains unclear why Yamagami directed his animus at Abe.
The July 8 shooting has thrust the church’s legal troubles back into the national dialogue, in particular its battles with families who said they had been impoverished by large donations. Those payments were among billions of dollars in revenue from Japan that helped finance much of the church’s global political and business ambitions.
In one judgment from 2016, a Tokyo civil court awarded more than $270,000 in damages to the former husband of a church member, after she donated his inheritance, salary and retirement funds to the group to “save” him and his ancestors from damnation.
In another civil case from 2020, a judge ordered the church and other defendants to pay damages to a woman after members had convinced her that her child’s cancer was caused by familial sins. On their advice, she spent tens of thousands of dollars on church goods and services, like researching her family history and buying blessings.
This month, church officials said they had struck an agreement in 2009 with the family of Yamagami’s mother to repay about $360,000 in donations she had made over the years. In an interview, Yamagami’s uncle said she had given at least twice that.
Many families have settled complaints against the church through court-arbitrated agreements, according to Hiroshi Watanabe, a lawyer who has negotiated some of them.
The Rev. Sun Myung Moon founded the Unification Church in South Korea in 1954. Five years later, he opened its first overseas branch, in Japan, which quickly became the church’s largest revenue source.
Abe’s grandfather, Nobusuke Kishi, a former prime minister, appeared at events sponsored by a group that Moon established to fight communism. Decades later, in 2021, Abe spoke by video feed to a conference in Seoul, South Korea, sponsored by a church-affiliated nonprofit organization, praising its “focus and emphasis on family values.”
An ardent Korean nationalist, Moon was educated in Japan while his own country lived under its colonial rule.
His theology reflected his ambivalence toward Japan, describing it in his sermons as both a potential savior and a satanic power.
During visits, Moon warned Japanese followers that they were steeped in sin and exhorted them to sacrifice everything for the church.
“Each of you needs to restore, through paying indemnity, the sins committed by your ancestors in history,” he told a group of believers in 1973, instructing them to “shed blood, sweat and tears.”.
Hundreds of thousands heeded his call. By the mid-1980s, billions of dollars in donations had flowed from Japanese families into the church’s coffers. Moon used the money to build a sprawling business empire and a network of nonprofit organizations and media outlets, like The Washington
Times, that he leveraged for political influence. Families were asked to make constant donations and pay steep fees to purchase various religious services and leather-bound volumes of Moon’s teachings, according to court judgments handed down in subsequent civil suits against the group.
By the early 1990s, Moon’s power in Japan had peaked. In the years since, the church’s power and influence in Japan — as well as the complaints against it — have ebbed. But “even now, there are a lot of people like Mr. Yamagami’s family,” said Yoshifu Arita, a member of parliament who has frequently spoken out about the issue. “Japanese society just doesn’t see them.”
Yamagami, however, never lost sight of the Unification Church. His mother’s actions had “plunged my brother, my sister and me into hell,” he wrote on a Twitter account.
Amid anti-Korean screeds, misogynistic musings and commentary on Japanese politics, the account — which has been suspended — describes a painful childhood and a seething fury at his mother’s allegiance to the Unification Church. He blamed the relationship for his own failings in life.
In his letter, Yamagami said he had spent years dreaming of revenge, but had become convinced that attacking the church would accomplish nothing.
Abe is “not my enemy,” Yamagami wrote, “he’s nothing more than one of the Unification Church’s most powerful sympathizers.”
But, he added, “I no longer have the luxury to think about the political meaning or consequences that Abe’s death will bring.”