The court says the Federation of World Peace and Unification has inflicted ‘an unprecedentedly large amount of damage’ on Japanese donors, many of whom had offered virtually all their savings under pressure from radical adherents.
Sun Myung Moon and his wife, Hak Ja, during a visit to Britain in March 1972. Steve Wood/Express/Getty Images, file
SEOUL — No more mass weddings, no more “Moonies”: The wellspring of the funds that the Unification Church has lavished on religious and business activities worldwide is drying up.
That’s the significance of the order handed down by a district court at Tokyo for the Federation of World Peace and Unification, as the church came to be known in Japan, to cease to exist. The church, the court said, has inflicted “an unprecedentedly large amount of damage” on Japanese donors, many of whom had offered virtually all their savings under pressure from radical adherents who wouldn’t leave them alone.
The church, founded in South Korea after the Korean War by the late Reverend Sun Myung Moon, was so powerful in Japan that high-level figures in the ruling Libdral-Democratic Party not only condoned its activities but counted on it for funding. “The Japanese church was by far the biggest,” a former Unification Church member, Michael Breen, told the Sun. “It provided funds and people to the international movement for decades. “
It was only after the assassination in July 2022 of a prime minister, Shinzo Abe, after speaking at a political rally at Nara, Japan, that outcries against church activities forced politicians to seriously distance themselves. Japanese authorities intensified their investigation of the church, which the assassin accused of donating funds to Abe while compelling his mother to hand over her life savings.
The church in Japan is expected to appeal the court order to dissolve, to disappear, but sentiment against it is at such a fever-pitch that it’s not likely ever to regain anywhere near the influence it had in its heyday, when it claimed its largest mass following in the 1970s and 1980s.
No longer are young “Moonies” raising funds by selling flowers on street corners while dedicated worshippers proselytize for funds and members. No longer is the Reverend Moon seen by thousands as “the second Messiah” years before his widow, Hak Ja Han, the mother of 14 of his children, wound up with much of the empire, including the Washington Times, a daily newspaper published at Washington, D.C., since 1982.
“The church is by no means squeaky clean,” Mr. Breen, author of a biography of Moon, said. “Its fundraising practices were dodgy to say the least. Also, the way it used members to raise money was unconscionable.” Nonetheless, Mr. Breen, who runs a communications firm at Seoul, believes the church “apologized and rectified these years earlier”
At Tokyo, though, the court said that a “declaration of compliance” issued in 2009 in response to charges against the church did not mean that “fundamental measures have been taken to significantly change the nature of the organization and the behavior of its followers.” The Japanese education ministry submitted 5,000 “pieces of evidence,” according to a leading Japanese newspaper, _Asahi Shimbun_, claiming “around 1,550 victims and 20.4 billion Japanese yen in damages” — $135.5 million at the current exchange rate.
A longtime church member and veteran of years of work for a church-funded business told the Sun anonymously via email that “to understand what is happening in Japan you have to look at the split in the family.”
Moon’s widow, Ms. Han, who used to sit beside him at mass weddings of thousands of people whom she and her husband and assistants enjoyed pairing from photographs and brief bios, not only battled with him while he was alive but also fought with their sons for control of the empire after his death in 2012 at the age of 92.
“Since 2013, the Mother ship has prevailed,” according to my ex-Moonie source. “The fundraising practices in Japan were ramped back up but without the moral authority of the founder himself. The tragic death of Shinzo Abe served to in effect turn off the spigot of much of the church’s cash flow and a number of properties have subsequently been sold.”
Among organizations to which the funding has dried up is the Washington Times. “TWT claimed several years ago to have broken even, but no one I know believes it,” the source said. “How are they keeping the lights on? I am asked that question from time to time but have no answers.”