Explained | The controversial Unification Church and Japan’s investigation into it

Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida has had to reshuffle his cabinet in response to public anger over the ruling party’s ties with the Church

The story so far: The Japanese government on Monday, October 17, ordered an immediate investigation into the Unification Church, a religious group that has come under scrutiny after the assassination of the country’s former Premier Shinzo Abe. The suspected assassin revealed that he targeted Mr. Abe owing to his ties with the Church. Revelations about the association of nearly half of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) lawmakers with the religious group have resulted in public anger and dwindled support for Prime Minister Fumio Kishida’s administration.

According to the Japan Times, a poll conducted by public broadcaster NHK between Ocober 8 and October 10 showed that the percentage of those who did not support the Kishida administration (43%) was more than those who did (38%) for the first time since he came to power a year ago. Mr. Kishida was forced in August to reshuffle his cabinet and remove Ministers with ties to the Unification Church as damage control in response to the unfolding scandal.

The Unification Church, formally known as the Family Federation for World Peace and Unification, is a religious group, often described as a ‘cult’ by critics, founded by late Reverend Sun Myung Moon in 1954 in South Korea. The Church, known for its ultra-conservative, anti-communist views, and mass-weddings where thousands of unmarried persons were matched by the Reverend, first expanded its international reach in Japan in the late 1950s and early 1960s.

The Church’s Seoul-based spokesperson, Ahn Ho-yeul, told Reuters that it has 6,00,000 followers in Japan and 10 million worldwide, although monitoring groups in Japan are doubtful about the figure.

Reverend Moon, who died in 2012, was a self-declared messiah who tapped into the Japanese demographic by invoking traditional family values and leveraging a feeling of guilt over the country’s past colonisation of the Korean Peninsula.

According to The New York Times, Mr. Moon, an ardent Korean nationalist, had an ambivalence toward Japan, and told his followers—or Moonies as they often called— that their country and ancestors had sinned greatly for which they had to sacrifice everything to the Church. Members were recruited in Japan through door-to-door campaigns, engaging relatives of existing members, railway station drives and university campaigns. A former member of the group narrated to the Japan Times how he was drawn in to the Church under the guise of a student exchange program and made to participate for long hours in recruitment drives and camps, where he was brainwashed.

The religious group collected massive donations from its adherents in multiple ways, with Japan becoming its biggest source of income. Mr. Moon reportedly used these donations to expand his business empire, the Church’s affliated organisations, and also started publications like The Washington Times.