The little-known role of Japan’s Communist Party in preparing the controversial decision of the Tokyo District Court.
by Marco Respinti
It is probably the most serious and reckless act of interference by a democratic government against a religious community since World War II. Yesterday, March 25, the Tokyo District Court granted in the first instance the request made months ago by the Japanese Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology on behalf of the entire government to dissolve the Family Federation for World Peace and Unification.
The decision is based on Japan’s Religious Organizations Law, which gives the possibility of dissolving a religious corporations, giving its assets to a liquidator, in the face of disturbances of “public welfare” (a limit to religious liberty prohibited by international law). In fact, the real “disturbance” and the only “deviance” of the Family Federation is anti-communism. Organizations associated with the church have effectively fought communist subversion in Japan and elsewhere in the world by all democratic means, informing the public, educating consciences, supporting non-Marxist politicians and promoting pro-peace initiatives.
Until 1994, the Family Federation was called the Unification Church. Founded in 1954 in Seoul, South Korea’s capital, by Reverend Sun Myung Moon (1920–2012), it was a new religious movement that experienced rapid international success. Today it is presided over by his widow, Dr. Hak-Ja Han Moon. Active in so many countries, it has always been a granite pillar of anti-communist, conservative policies and the defense of the natural family.
In the United States it was one of the most vibrant conservative realities in the years of the Reagan Administration, giving birth in 1982 to the influential daily newspaper “The Washington Times” and then to the now defunct monthly magazine (with hundreds of pages of in-depth coverage in each issue) “The World & I.” Ite also played the same crucial role in 1994, at the time of the Republican Party’s resounding victory in that year’s midterm elections under the banner of the “Contract with America” headed by Newt Gingrich (and imitated in 2001 by Silvio Berlusconi’s [1936-2023] “Contract with the Italians”). Gingrich, who became the Speaker of the House of Representatives in 1995, was a former enfant prodige of the so-called “New Right” (not to be confused, by easy but false assonance, with the French “Nouvelle droite”).
Around the world and over time, the Family Federation has sponsored hundreds of public warning and counter-information initiatives on the Soviet threat when it still existed, on Castro-Sandino-Communist subversion in Central and South America, on the security of the Indo-Pacific area in times of Chinese overreach, on Africa stripped by Communist powers, on Asia threatened by red ideocracies, and on the persecution of religions, including Christians. It has also cultivated the need for historical perspective. In the periodical of its associate organization Causa International, founded in New York in 1980, even the denunciation of the anti-Catholic genocide of the Vendée during the French Revolution found space. It also defended the natural family as a bulwark of civilization against the woke craze. In doing so, it stepped on some dangerous toes.
In Japan, the Communist Party has been particularly diligent in mounting a decade-long campaign against the Unification Church, promoting hate speech, weaving webs of falsehoods, and exciting politicians, media and public opinion against “the cult.” After all, “cult” is a vague polemical term easily applied to those we do not like. Mainline scholars, of whatever political opinion or religious faith, and even with no faith, do not use it. Indeed, it has no boundaries, no definitions, and no foundation. It is employed as a cudgel to demolish “the other” but, in practice, one never knows how to define it.
In fact, only the Communist Chinese, Putin’s Russia, secularist France, and what remains of a once vast circle of professional “cult hunters” use it today. The latter are in the West the secularist and technocratic counterpart of the old Marxist motto that religions are the opiate of the masses. In short, it is the idea that faiths, all of them, are by definition dark caverns where vile acts are committed, therefore deserving indiscriminately of annihilation. And in fact, these hunters always start with “cults,” but then they hit every pulpit. When those “cult hunters,” allied with the communists as it happened in Japan, manage to influence governments, freedom and democracy begin to succumb.
In fact, it is not known what crime the Family Federation has committed in Japan, so much so that it deserves to be dissolved in the acid of ideological animosity. Its opponents have accused it of “brainwashing,” exploitation of the faithful, intolerance in the education of young people, economic abuses, and “spiritual sales,” but these are just the usual stereotypes used against “cults.” A “cult” is whatever the “cult hunters” say is a “cult,” even if, as is the case of the Unification Church in Japan, the “cult” was never found guilty in a single criminal case. Indeed, the opposite is true. In Japan, modeled on what has already sadly happened in other countries, the bodies and consciences of Family Federation believers have been raped through “deprogramming,” which involved the kidnapping and segregation for years, in apartment-prisons, of believers deprogrammers claimed were in need of “rescue.” I have met some of them, while lecturing in Japan on religious freedom later the origin of a publication on the subject.
Now, a whole book could be filled with cases and contentions, specialist reports and expert papers showing the senselessness and malice of this prodigious case. A huge harvest of them is published online by Bitter Winter. Yet, nothing has stopped the red plot, and today it has achieved an important success. The Family Federation will appeal, but the whole situation remains dreadful.
The most acute and recent phase of a decades-long campaign, originally hatched and fueled by the Communist Party of Japan and its allies (or victims), started with the murder of former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe (1954–2022) on July 8, 2022. The murderer, Tetsuya Yamagami, claimed to have carried out the crime out of resentment against the former Unification Church, which he said was guilty of bankrupting his mother in 2002 by pushing her to make excessive donations. Abe was the target because he had ties of friendship and cooperation with the Church.
But too many things do not add up. The killer first wanted to target the movement’s leader, Dr. Hak Ja Han Moon, and only later, unable to reach her, he decided to kill Abe. Twenty years passed between his mother’s bankruptcy and the murder, during which many things were clarified and healed, including the return of substantial portions of her donations. And be that as it may, does a deranged man’s act against an innocent political leader turn the latter into a culprit, together with an entire Church that had completely licit dealings with him? Where has the rule of law gone, where is the logic?
But it is clear that thus, in one swoop, a social and cultural force with merits impossible to underestimate in the past and present struggle against communism, and the wing of the Liberal Democratic Party headed by the pro-Western and pro-American Abe are now being eliminated.
That is why the outrage at the government’s call for dissolution first and the Tokyo District Court’s decision now has also been enormous in the United States. In defense of the Family Federation, former Ambassador for Religious Freedom to the World Sam Brownback and current White House spiritual adviser Paula White-Cain have spoken out publicly on so many occasions that the whole affair may undermine the friendship between Washington and Tokyo. Vice President J.D. Vance made a strong-worded defense of religious freedom at the International Religious Freedom Summit 2025, one of the world’s largest themed events co-sponsored, with others, by the Universal Peace Federation (a nongovernmental organization linked to the Family Federation) and “The Washington Times” in the U.S. capital in February. And former House Speaker Gingrich has repeatedly pointed out, including immediately after the dissolution decision, that by acting against the Family Federation and against religious freedom, the Japanese government is violating international principles of freedom of religion or belief. Not unlike the communist government of totalitarian China.
