Japanese Government Breaks with Moonie Church
Will the U.S. right-wing do the same?
Since the assassination of Shinzo Abe, the Japanese government has taken a hard look at its ties to the Unification Church. Out of respect, America should do the same.
In the aftermath of the shooting, an internal investigation of Japan’s governing Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) showed alarming results. Out of 379 elected officials, 179 had interactions with the Unification Church. Seventeen received election help.
No, they aren’t Moonies. Neither was Abe. But, they either accepted support for election campaigns, attended meetings or spoke at events for pay. Abe’s younger brother, former Defense Minister Nobuo Kishi, was among 17 who accepted church followers as election campaign volunteers.
The relationship between the Unification Church and right-wing Japanese politicians goes back decades. Sun Myung Moon (1920–2012) launched the church in South Korea in 1954 and expanded to Japan five years later.
In the 1960s, Moon courted former prime minister Nobusuke Kishi, Abe’s grandfather. Kishi saw the church as an ally against communism and trade unions. In 1968, he helped found the church’s political unit in Tokyo.
Soon, Japan had the largest number of Moonies in the world, and they were generous with their yen. At the church’s behest, Japanese followers dug deep in their pockets to atone for their ancestral sins, including Japan’s 1910- 1945 colonialization of the Korean Peninsula.
The origin of Moon’s deep pockets remains unclear. However, he enjoyed the support of two Japanese billionaires, Yoshio Kodama and Ryoichi Sasakawa, both admittedly fascists. There were also persistent rumors of funding from the Korean CIA.
In 1971, Moon moved to the United States and began courting politicians while building a multibillion-dollar global business empire.
The church’s assets include the Washington Times, a shipbuilding operation, restaurants, a seafood company, real estate holdings, and other businesses. In South Korea, the Tongil Group produces ginseng, construction materials, and machine parts for the South Korean military.
The Assassin
On July 8, 2022, Tetsuya Yamagami,41, fatally shot the former prime minister with a homemade gun held together with duct tape. Abe was making a campaign speech in the western city of Nara.
There’s no question of Yamagami’s guilt. Security forces wrestled him to the ground. He put up no resistance and admitted to the deed. Later that day, police confiscated a computer from his one-room apartment not far from the crime scene. It contained a draft of a letter he sent to a blogger in western Japan the day before the shooting.
“After my mother joined the church in the 1990s, my entire teenage years were gone, with some 100 million yen wasted. It’s not an exaggeration to say my experience during that time has kept distorting my entire life.”
Yamagami’s parents ran a construction business and were relatively well off. His father committed suicide when Yamagami was a toddler. In 1991, when the suspect was 10 or 11 years old, his mother joined the Unification Church of Japan.
As a widow, Yamagami’s mother would have been vulnerable to the church’s spiritual sales tactics. Some former church members say they paid enormous sums to free their loved ones from hell.
Over time, she gave the church 100 million yen (US $735,000). She also donated land she inherited from her father and the house where she lived with her three children, one of whom eventually killed himself. He was unable to afford treatment for cancer due to the family’s collapse.
A male relative says the Yamagami children often called him saying they had nothing to eat. He helped as much as possible. However, he stopped giving the family money because the mother gave it all to the church.
Even after she went bankrupt in 2002, Yamagami’s mother continued donating small sums. After the assassination, she apologized not to her family but to the church for causing them trouble.
Yamagami lost his chance to attend college due to the family’s money problems. In Aug. 2002, he joined the Japan Maritime Self Defense Force. He left in 2005 as a quartermaster with the rank of leading seaman.
In Oct. 2020, Yamagami got a job as a forklift operator at a factory in Kyoto Prefecture. Coworkers described him as a mild-mannered person who ate lunch alone in his car. He resigned in May 2022 and joined the ranks of the unemployed. At the time of the assassination, he was running out of funds. He had no previous criminal history.
Yamagami’s experience was not an anomaly. The church has come under fire for its high-pressure fundraising tactics. Even though it originated in South Korea, most donations come from the Japanese people.
Ten months before the assassination, on Sept. 11, 2021, Yamagami watched Shinzo Abe heap praise on the church at a virtual rally. The right-wing nationalist was not the only paid speaker singing the church’s praises.
At the same virtual rally, former US President Donald Trump said, “What they have achieved on the peninsula is just amazing. In just a few decades, the inspiration they have caused for the entire planet is unbelievable, and I congratulate you again and again.”
Until then, Yamagami had planned to kill Moon’s widow, Hak Ja Han, or other church leaders. The video message caused him to switch his focus to Abe. He began watching YouTube videos to learn how to build a gun. He tested it by shooting at the neighborhood Unification Church. Later, investigators found the bullet holes.
In the aftermath of the assassination, Prime Minister Fumio Kishida’s approval ratings dropped sharply. Many Japanese expressed empathy for Yamagami, especially those of the same age bracket, ‘the lost generation.’ Even though Japan is the third largest economy, many in Yamagami’s age bracket are unmarried and trapped in low-wage jobs.
On Sept. 22, 2022, Kishida ordered LDP members to cut ties with the Unification Church. He moved seven ministers out of the Cabinet, including Abe’s younger brother, defense minister Nobuo Kishi.
But what about the United States?
The Unification Church is not LGBTQ-friendly, to put it mildly. Moon called gays “dirty dung-eating dogs.” With their anti-communist stance and fixation on so-called family values, the church attracts mostly, though not exclusively, right-wing politicians.
Ex-president Trump is one of many who support the Unification Church by speaking at their events for undisclosed amounts of money.
The relationship between the Moonies and the Republican party goes back at least to the 1970s. In the fall of 1973, Moon defended Richard Nixon from impeachment. The church launched “Project Watergate,” a blitzkrieg of rallies, full-page ads in major newspapers, prayer breakfasts, and letters to the editor.
On Feb. 1, 1974, Nixon publicly thanked Moon for his support. The impeachment proceedings ended without an impeachment vote after Nixon resigned from office, against Moon’s advice, six months later.
Moon founded the arch-conservative Washington Times in 1982 during the Reagan administration. Throughout its history, it has supported the policies of Republican presidents, including Reagan, George H.W. Bush, George W. Bush, and Trump. Reagan insisted on reading the Times every morning.
Moon had a cozy relationship with George H. W. Bush. As vice president, Bush invited Moon to Reagan’s inauguration.
In 1995, a few years after Moon died, ex-president Bush spent a week in Japan promoting the Women’s Federation for World Peace, a Moonie front organization founded by Hak Ja Han.
Several Japanese groups urged Bush to cancel, saying his presence would lend legitimacy to the church.
“Your cooperation with the Unification Church has been a source of great apprehension and surprise among residents in Japan,'' the United Church of Christ in Japan, a prominent mainstream Christian group, wrote Bush.
Hiroshi Yamaguchi, leader of a group of 300 lawyers, said the women’s federation used public figures to lure people to events where church members solicited donations.
Bush went anyways. He and Barbara Bush spoke at six events in seven days, culminating in a rally that drew 50,000 people to the Tokyo Dome. Later, after scrutiny from the Washington Post, he gave his speaker’s fee, estimated at $80,000 per speech, to charity.
Mike Pence, former Defense Secretary Mark Esper, Dick Cheney, past UN Secretary General Bak Ki Moon, Mikhail Gorbachev, Rosalynn Carter, Coretta Scott King, and others have spoken at women’s federation events either in person or virtually.
So has Jonathan Fallwell, the son of the founder of the Moral Majority. So has televangelist Paula White, Trump’s spiritual advisor. She traveled all the way to South Korea to do so.
In the 1990s, Bill Cosby, Barbara Walters, Christopher Reeve, and astronaut Sally Ride spoke or entertained at events sponsored by the women’s federation.
Cosby and Walters later said they were unaware of the front organization’s relationship to the Unification Church. Thirty years later, several LDP members made the same statement. It’s getting harder to believe.
Even after Shinzo’s assassination, Republican leaders can’t get enough of the Unification Church. They are its primary fodder. Like Abe, they aren’t Moonies. But the church pays well for the aura of credibility they provide.
One month after the assassination, on Aug. 12, 2022, Mike Pompeo and Newt Gingrich traveled to Seoul to speak at a conference marking the 10th anniversary of Moon’s death. Trump recorded a video message played during the meeting. It was a remarkable display of tone deafness.
The Moon Brothers and the Trump Brothers
When Moon died of pneumonia at 92, his Harvard-educated youngest son, Hyung Jin Moon (Sean), 42, broke away from the established church. He founded the Rod of Iron Ministries in Pennsylvania, an AR-15 worshipping sect. They promote MAGA politics and participated in the Jan. 6 insurrection.
Sean’s older brother, Kook Jin (Justin) Moon, 52, founded the Kahr Firearms Group, which includes the gun manufacturers Kahr Arms, Auto-Ordnance, and Magnum Research. In Aug. 2016, Eric Trump and Lara Trump attended the grand opening of the Tommy Gun Warehouse, the Kahr Arms retail store in Greeley, Pennsylvania.
Eric gave remarks at the ceremony, thanking Justin Moon for defending the Second Amendment. “You deserve tremendous, tremendous credit,” he said. Donald Trump Jr. has also attended its events.
Every fall, for the past few years, the brothers host the Rod of Iron Freedom Festival in the parking lot of the Tommy Gun Warehouse. In 2020, Steve Bannon spoke to a crowd of roughly 5,000 by telephone. They ate up his lies about the upcoming presidential election.
As I conclude this article, Yamagami sits in a detention center in Osaka, undergoing a psychiatric examination. It will determine if he is mentally competent for indictment. More than 7,000 people have signed a petition requesting prosecutorial leniency.
There’s more than enough guilt to go around.