Comment With door-to-door sales tactics aimed at grieving elderly people and the cultivation of prominent political leaders, the Unification Church has spent decades establishing Japan as its most reliable profit center, according to researchers who study the tentacled spiritual and economic global empire. . Now, after the suspected killer of former Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe told police he blamed a religious group for his mother’s bankruptcy and the Unification Church confirmed the attacker’s mother was a member of its Japanese branch, the church’s role, long controversial in the country, is under scrutiny once again. The suspected attacker, Tetsuya Yamagami, told police that his mother was financially ruined after being pressured to donate large sums of money to a religious group, according to Japanese reports. Tomihiro Tanaka, who heads the church’s Japanese branch, said at a news conference Monday that Yamagami’s mother joined the organization in 1998, then left for a while and returned to the fold this year. A church official said he had no information about the mother’s donations to the organization and had no record of Yamagami himself ever belonging to the church. Police have not yet named the religious organization. On Tuesday, Japanese media reported that bullet holes were found in the facade of the Unification Church building in Nara. The suspect told investigators he had tested his gun there before shooting Abe, according to Japanese broadcaster Fuji News Network. The Unification Church controls dozens of ministries in Japan, including one in Nara, a few hundred meters from where Abe was shot on Friday. Abe, like many other world leaders, has appeared at Unification Church-related events as a paid speaker, most recently in September at a program that also featured former President Donald Trump, who spoke via video link. Speaking at a “Rally of Hope” organized by Moon’s widow, Hak Ja Han Moon, who is known in Unification circles as “True Mother,” Trump called her “a terrific person” and praised “her her incredible work on behalf of peace around the world.” He added that he is grateful to both moons: “The inspiration they have caused to the entire planet is incredible.” Sun Myung Moon died in 2012 and his wife and children have been fighting for control of his businesses and other organizations ever since. At the same program where Trump spoke, Abe expressed to Hak Ja Han Moon “my deep thanks for your untiring efforts in resolving disputes in the world, especially in relation to the peaceful reunification of the Korean Peninsula.” Sun Myung Moon, who called himself the messiah, preached that Jesus had instructed him to continue his work on Earth. Throughout its history, Moon’s church and its affiliates have paid top dollar to attract world political leaders, celebrities and prominent clergy of other faiths to speak at conferences, part of a long-running campaign to gain credibility connecting the Unification organizations with famous and respected personalities. “They will pay for whoever gives them legitimacy,” Larry Zilliox, a longtime researcher who has focused on Moon’s business and political initiatives in the United States and around the world, said Saturday. “The big names attract the smaller names, the people who can help them with their local ventures.” In the mid-1990s, for example, former presidents George HW Bush and Gerald Ford, as well as comedian Bill Cosby and former Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev, spoke at Moon-sponsored conferences in Japan and Washington. Bush spoke just months after a Japanese court awarded more than $150 million in damages to thousands of Japanese who sued the Unification Church and a Moon-owned company, Happy World, after they were pressured to donate millions of dollars to bail out their deceased loved ones. faces. “Happiness in the other world. (After the Washington Post reported on his appearance, Bush decided to donate his speaking fee, which at the time was generally about $80,000, to charity.) For more than six decades, the Unification Church and its various offshoots have relied on Japan as the profit center that helped subsidize their activities around the world, including in the United States, according to various studies of the church by academic scholars and government officials. researchers. Although some of Moon’s most famous ventures, such as the Washington Times newspaper and media ventures in several other countries, lost money, the church could rely on its Japanese arm to generate a strong revenue stream based primarily on what he called it “spiritual selling”. “ Church members in Japan were “scrolling obituaries and knocking on people’s doors and telling them ‘your deceased loved one has contacted us and they want you to go to your bank and send money to the Unification Church so your loved one can lifted up to the spirit world,” Steve Hassan, a onetime Unification Church member turned mental health counselor and author of books on destructive cults, said Saturday. Despite the church’s roots in Korea, Japan has traditionally provided up to 70 percent of the church’s wealth, according to historians who have studied the church. A former high-ranking member of the Japanese church once told The Post that Moon’s organizations had brought $800 million from Japan to the United States from the mid-1970s to the mid-1980s. “Moon sent bags of cash, big fat bags, stacks and stacks of hundreds, from Korea and Japan to downtown Manhattan,” one of the church’s main New York properties, a former Unification executive, told the Post in 1997. , Ron Paquette. “Whenever we asked where the money came from, the answer was that it just came ‘from the Father’, the term church members used for Moon. In Japan, it was common for many years to see Unifiers selling ginseng products and religious items such as miniature stone pagodas manufactured by Moon-owned companies in Korea. The church members’ hard-sell tactics, as well as their claims that their products had spiritual powers, led to class-action lawsuits in Japan, with hundreds of claimants winning settlements. Akihiko Kurokawa, the leader of a small political party in Japan, the NHK Party, said in a televised broadcast last month that the Unification Church was “an anti-Japanese cult” and blamed Abe’s grandfather, former prime minister Nobusuke Kishi, for church. his initial move to Japan in 1958. Moon started his first newspaper in Japan in 1975 and brought his signature mass wedding followers to the country soon after. In Moon’s theology, his native Korea is the country of “Adam,” the homeland of a dominant race destined to rule the world, and Japan is the country of “Eve,” subservient to Korea, Hassan said. The Unification Church taught that Eve had sexual relations with Satan, leading mankind to fall from grace, with the Moon now appointed to bring mankind to salvation. Moon’s widow now controls the Unification Church’s official successor, the Family Federation for World Peace and Unification. A rival group started by Moon’s son Hyung Jin, also known as Sean, has also expanded into Japan. Based in Newfoundland, Pa., the World Peace and Unification Sanctuary Church, better known as Rod of Iron Ministries, preaches that AR-15 assault weapons are an important part of religious ceremonies designed “to defend ourselves against in an aggressive satanic world.” Hyung Jin’s brother Kook Jin (Justin), known in church circles as “True Son,” owns a gun manufacturing company, Kahr Arms, in Greeley, Pa., and was sent to Japan by his father in 2010 to repel efforts. to remove the church’s legal status there. “It was a very difficult time,” Cook Jin said in a speech that year, “because the police conducted quite an extensive investigation of our church. They actually had almost 10,000 law enforcement officers investigating our church. They arrested members of our church and raided our churches — not just one or two places, but many, many.” In the speech, Kook Jin denied that the church was pressuring Japanese people to make large donations to save the spirits of their dead loved ones. He said he had interviewed many of the church’s big donors in Japan: “I asked them, ‘What motivates you to donate so much money?’ And you will see that in so many cases, our brothers and sisters will tell you that their ancestors came to them and told them to do it.” Julia Mio Inuma in Tokyo contributed to this report.
