Tokyo High Court, in its March 4 ruling, upheld a decision dissolving the Unification Church of Japan and it is likely to have wider repercu
Japanese court dissolves Unification Church. Will Korea be next?
UPI March 6, 2026 at 11:51 PM
By Michael Marshall
The Tokyo High Court, in its March 4 ruling, upheld a lower court decision dissolving the Unification Church of Japan, formally known as the Family Federation for World Peace and Unification. The decision is likely to have wider repercussions, particularly for the Unification Church of Korea.
The government charged that the group engaged in illicit fundraising practices, using extreme pressure to solicit repeated large donations. These had ruined families financially, the government said.
A church spokesman claimed that such practices had been discontinued since 2009.
The case was brought by the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT) which is responsible for religious associations. The court agreed with the Ministry's claim that the church's activities caused "substantial harm to public welfare," and so were in breach of Japan's Civil Code.
The church can appeal to Japan's Supreme Court but the High Court ruling takes effect immediately. Church properties have been locked and a liquidator appointed to manage its assets.
"I hope the liquidation process will be carried out properly under the supervision of the court, ensuring swift redress for the victims," Chief Cabinet Secretary Minoru Kihara told a press conference.
The Unification Church in Korea is also under government investigation. Its situation is likely to worsen following Japan's dissolution order.
Unification Church leader, Hak Ja Han, is currently on trial in Seoul together with her chief aide Jung Wonju. They are charged with illegal political donations under South Korea's Political Funds Act, as well as embezzlement and destruction of evidence.
They are alleged to have channeled church funds to influence ruling party legislators and purchased jewelry and a designer handbag intended for former First Lady, Kim Keon-hee. Another close aide of Han's, Yoon Yong-ho, was sentenced in January to 14 months in prison Under the Political Funds Act and the Improper Solicitations and Graft Act.
South Korean President Lee Jae-myung ordered the Ministry of Government Legislation to review the legal grounds for dissolving religious foundations that violate the constitutional principle of church-state separation last December. That scrutiny will likely intensify in the wake of Japan's decision.
Dr. Hyun Jin Preston Moon, eldest living son of the late Rev. Sun Myung Moon, founder of the Unification Movement, said such scrutiny is called for.
In a recent interview held in Korea, he broke his 15-year silence on the matter, stating that the Unification Church is a "criminal entity" and that the Korean government should dissolve the organization and remove its religious status.
"No religious, sincere people of faith would have done all the things that the Unification Church did in the name of religion." Dr. Moon expressed support for the dissolution proceedings already underway in Japan and potentially forthcoming in Korea.
He explained that his father never intended to create another traditional religion or denomination but envisioned a movement of high ideals based on universal principles and shared values. As he worked closely with his father as the sole legitimate heir to his spiritual authority, he said, leaders and elders within the movement resisted reforms and instead, established the Unification Church as an institutional religious structure. The internal division arose as a result, according to Moon.
"They hijacked key movement entities, and I chose to continue the path that our movement was always on."
While supporting the dissolution of the Unification Church's religious status, Moon expressed his intent to reclaim the entire organizational foundation built by his father, himself, and by sincere members worldwide and reform the entities to serve their original purposes.
Asked about his mother, Hak Ja Han, he said that he considers her a victim of corrupt, incompetent leaders. He asked that his over 80-year-old mother be freed. "She did not know what she was being misled to do. Those who consciously broke Korean law were the leaders of the Unification Church, and they should be in prison."
[Dr. Hyun Jin Preston Moon is former chairman of UCI, the ultimate holding company that owns UPI.]
Ten Years After Jonestown, the Battle Intensifies Over the Influence of ‘Alternative’ Religions (1988)
by Bob Sipchen - November 17, 1988 - Los Angeles Times
Eldridge Broussard Jr.’s face screwed into a grimace of such anger and pain that the unflappable Oprah Winfrey seemed unnerved. It hurts to be branded “the new Jimmy Jones” by a society eager to condemn what it doesn’t understand, the founder of the Ecclesia Athletic Assn. lamented on TV just a few days after his 8-year-old daughter had been beaten to death, apparently by Ecclesia members.
At issue were complex questions of whether the group he had formed to instill discipline in ghetto youth, and led from Watts to Oregon, had evolved into a dangerous cult. But Broussard couldn’t have found a less sympathetic audience than the group gathered around the TV in the bar of the Portland Holiday Inn.
There last month for the annual conference of the Chicago-based Cult Awareness Network were people whose kin had crumpled onto the body heaps at Jonestown, Guyana, 10 years ago, and people who believed they or family members had lost not their lives, but good chunks of them, to gurus and avatars less infamous but no less evil than Jim Jones.
One group’s cult is another’s “new religious movement,” though, and in the 10 years since Jonestown, a heated holy war of sorts has been mounting over the issues of how to define and contend with so-called cults.
The battle lines aren’t always well defined. Ongoing guerrilla actions between those who see themselves as crusaders against potential Jonestowns and those who see themselves as the persecuted members of outcast religious groups comprise the shifting legal and political fronts. On the outskirts of the ideological battleground is another loosely knit force that sees itself as the defender of a First Amendment besieged by vigilantes all too eager to kiss off the Constitution as they quash beliefs that don’t fit their narrow-minded criteria of what’s good and real. As one often-quoted definition has it: “A cult is a religion someone I don’t like belongs to.”
“It’s spiritual McCarthyism,” Lowell D. Streiker, a Northern California counselor, said of the cult awareness cause. To him, “the anti-cult network” is itself as a “cult of persecution,” cut from the same cloth as Colonial witch hunters and the Ku Klux Klan.
The key anti-cult groups, by most accounts, are CAN, a secular nondenominational group of 30 local affiliates; the Massachusetts-based American Family Foundation; the Interfaith Coalition of Concern About Cults and the Jewish Federation Council’s Commission on Cults and Missionaries.
Although they contend that their ranks continue to fill with the victims of cults or angry family members, they concede that the most significant rallying point came in the fall of 1978 when the leader of one alleged cult put a rattlesnake in an enemy’s mailbox and another led 912 people to their deaths.
Even though nothing so dramatic has happened since, cults have quietly been making inroads into the fabric of mainstream American life, and the effects are potentially as serious as the deaths at Jonestown, cult critics say.
With increased wealth and public relations acumen--with members clothed by Brooks Brothers rather than in saffron sheets--the 1,000 or more new cults that some estimate have sprung up in America since the ‘60s have become “a growth industry which is diversifying,” said Dr. Louis Jolyon West, director of UCLA’s Neuropsychiatric Institute. “They have made steady progress on all fronts.”
Uglier Connotations
In the broadest sense, Webster defines a cult as simply “a system of religious worship or ritual.” Even before Jonestown, though, the word had taken on broader and uglier connotations.
To make a distinction, critics use the term destructive cult, or totalist cult. The issue, they say, pivots on the methods groups use to recruit and hold together followers.
CAN describes a destructive cult as one that “uses systematic, manipulative techniques of thought reform or mind control to obtain followers and constrict their thoughts and actions. These techniques are imposed without the person’s knowledge and produce observable changes in the individual’s autonomy, thoughts and actions. . . .”
A 1985 conference on cults co-sponsored by the UCLA Neuropsychiatric Institute and the American Family Federation came up with this definition:
“A group or movement exhibiting a great or excessive devotion or dedication to some person, idea, or thing and employing unethically manipulative techniques of persuasion and control . . . designed to advance the goals of the group’s leaders, to the actual or possible detriment of members, their families, or the community.”
The “manipulative techniques” in question are what cult critics call mind control or brainwashing.
To critics of the critics, on the other hand, brainwashing amounts to hooey.
And both sides say the weight of evidence is on their side.
New Beliefs, Personalities
Cult critics often point to classic surveys on brainwashing, which catalogue methods which they say are routinely used by cults of every color, religious and secular, to manipulate unsuspecting people into adopting new beliefs, and often, in effect, new personalities.
Among the techniques are constant repetition of doctrine; application of intense peer pressure; manipulation of diet so that critical faculties are adversely affected; deprivation of sleep; lack of privacy and time for reflection; cutting ties with the recruits’ past life; reduction of outside stimulation and influences; skillful use of ritual to heighten mystical experience; and invention of a new vocabulary which narrows the range of experience and constructs a new reality for cult members.
Margaret Singer, a former professor of psychology at UC Berkeley, describes psychological problems that have been attributed to cultic experiences, ranging from the despair that comes from having suddenly abandoned ones previous values, norms and ideals to types of “induced psychopathy.” Other psychologists and lay observers list similar mental and emotional problems linked to the indoctrination and rituals of cults.
Sociologist Dick Anthony, author of the book “Spiritual Choices,” and former director of the UC Berkeley-affiliated Center for the Study of New Religions, argues the exact opposite position.
“There’s a large research literature published in mainstream journals on the mental health effects of new religions,” he said. “For the most part the effects seem to be positive in any way that’s measurable.”
He and other defenders of new religions discount so-called mind control techniques, or believe the term has been misappropriated by anti-cult activists.
“Coercive Persuasion is a bombastic redescription of familiar forms of influence which occur everyday and everywhere,” said Streiker. “Someone being converted to a demanding religious movement is no more or less brainwashed than children being exposed to commercials during kiddy programs which encourage them to eat empty calories or buy expensive toys.”
“An attempt to persuade someone of something is a process protected by our country’s First Amendment right of free speech and communication,” said attorney Jeremiah Gutman head of the New York City branch of the American Civil Liberties Union and an outspoken critic of the anti-cult groups. “What one person believes to be an irrefutable and obvious truth is someone else’s errant nonsense.”
‘Fraud and Manipulation’
But anti-cult spokespeople say they have no interest in a group’s beliefs. Their concern is when destructive cults use “fraud and manipulation,” to get people to arrive at those beliefs, whatever they may be. Because people are unaware of the issues, though, cults have insinuated themselves into areas of American life where they are influencing people who may not even know where the influence is coming from, they contend.
The political arena is the obvious example, anti-cult activists say.
Followers of the Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh had a major impact on the small town government of Antelope, Ore., and Jim Jones had managed to thrust himself and his church into the most respectable Democratic party circles in San Francisco before the exodus to Guyana, for instance.
But recently the process has expanded, with the Rev. Sun Myung Moon’s Unification Church the leading example of a cult that is quietly gaining political clout, they say.
“What Jim Jones did to Democrats in San Francisco, Sun Myung Moon is doing to Republicans all across country now,” Kisser said.
Moon’s most obvious stab at mainstream legitimacy, critics say, was his purchase in 1982 of the Washington Times, a D.C. daily newspaper, and his financial nurturing of the paper’s magazine Insight--both of which have an official policy of complete editorial independence from the church.
In September, 1987, the conservative American Spectator magazine published an article titled “Can Buy Me Love: The Mooning of Conservative America,” in which managing editor Andrew Ferguson questioned the way the political right is lapping up Moon money, citing, among many examples, the $500,000 or more the late Terry Dolan’s National Conservative Alliance accepted in 1984. When the church got wind of the article, the Spectator received a call from the executive director of the Unification Church’s World Media Assn. warning that if it ran, the Times “would strike back and strike back severely,” Ferguson wrote in an addendum to the piece.
‘Everyone Speaks Korean’
Therapist Steven Hassan, a former “Moonie” and the author of the just-released book “Combatting Cult Mind Control,” estimates that the church now sponsors 200 businesses and “front organizations.”
Moon “has said he wants an automatic theocracy to rule the world,” explained Hassan, who, on Moon’s orders, engaged in a public fast for Nixon during Watergate and another fast at the U.N. to protest the withdrawal of troops from Korea. “He visualizes a world where everyone speaks Korean only, where all religion but his is abolished, where his organization chooses who will mate, and he and family and descendants rule in a heroic monarchy.”
Moon “is very much in support of the democratic system,” counters John Biermans , director of public affairs for the church. “His desire is for people to become God-centered people. Then democracy can fulfill its potential”
Besides, he said, “this is a pluralistic society, people of all faiths inject their beliefs into the system on every level . . . Using terms like ‘front groups’ and ‘insinuating,’ is just a way to attack something. It’s not even honest.”
Some observers dismiss concern about alleged Unificationist infiltration as self-serving hysteria whipped up by the anti-cultists.
“How much actual influence (the Unification Church) has seems questionable,” said David Bromley, a professor of sociology at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, and the author of the 1981 book “Strange Gods, the Great American Cult Scare.”
Bromley estimates, for instance, that the church brings $200 million a year into the U.S. from abroad. But he sees no evidence that the money, much of it spent on all-expense-paid fact-finding tours and conferences for journalists, politicians and clergypeople, is money well-invested as far as political impact goes.
The church, he estimates, is losing about $50 million a year on its Washington Times newspaper and the ranks of Unificationists, and most other new religions, in America are thinning as well.
Veterans of the anti-cult front, however, say that the appearance that cults are fading is an illusion. “Like viruses, many of them mutate into new forms,” when under attack, West of UCLA said. And new types of cults are arising to fill the void, they say.
Cult critics point, for instance, to the rise of such groups as the est offshoot called Forum, and to Lifespring and Insight--all of which CAN characterizes as “human potential cults” and all of which are utilized in mainstream American business to promote productivity and motivation.
Observers such as Gordon Melton of the Institute for the Study of Religious Institutions in Santa Barbara explain that many of these New Age-type trainings have their roots in the old fashioned motivational pep talks and sales technique seminars that have been the staples of American business for decades.
But critics see the so-called “psychotechnologies” utilized by some of these groups as insidious. For one thing, they say, the meditation, confessional sharing, and guided imagery methods some of them use are more likely to make employees muzzy-headed than competitive.
Other critics say the trainings violate employee’s rights. Richard Watring, a personnel director for Budget Rent-a-Car, who has been charting the incorporation of “New Age” philosophies into business trainings, is concerned that employees are often compelled to take the courses and then required to adapt a new belief system which may be incompatible with their own religious convictions. As a Christian he finds such mental meddling inappropriate for corporations.
He and other cult critics are heartened by recent cases, still pending, in which employees, or former employees, have sued their employer for compelling them to take trainings they felt conflicted with their own religious beliefs.
Most observers scoring the action on the broader legal battlefield, however, call it a toss-up, and perceived victories for either side have often proved Pyrrhic.
Threats of Litigation
Richard Ofshe, a sociologist at UC Berkeley, fought three separate legal battles with the drug and alcohol rehabilitation organization Synanon over research he published on the group. Although he ultimately won the suits, he said the battle wound up costing the university $600,000. And evidence obtained in other lawsuits showed that Synanon had skillfully wielded threats of litigation to keep several other critical stories from being published or broadcast, he said.
Similarly, a recently released book “Cults and Consequences,” went unpublished for several years because insurers were wary of the litigious nature of some of the groups mentioned, said Rachel Andres, director of the Jewish Federation Council of Greater Los Angeles’ Commission on Cults and Missionaries and the book’s co-editor.
But the most interesting litigation of late involves either a former member who is suing the organization to which he or she belonged, or a current member of a new religious group who is suing a deprogrammer who attempted unsuccessfully to persuade the person to leave the group.
The most significant case, everyone agrees, is last month’s Molko decision by the California Supreme Court, which anti-cult groups have cheered as a major victory.
In that reversal of lower court decisions, the justices agreed that David Molko and another former member of the Unification Church could bring before a jury the claim that they were defrauded by recruiters who denied they had a church affiliation and then subjected the two to church mind control techniques, eventually converting them.
Mainstream religious organizations including the National Council on Churches, the American Baptist Churches in the USA and the California Ecumenical Council had filed briefs in support of the Unification Church, claiming that allowing lawsuits over proselytizing techniques could paralyze all religions.
“What they’re attacking is prayer, fasting and lectures,” said Biermans of the Unification Church. “The whole idea of brainwashing is unbelievably absurd. . . . If someone had really figured out a method of brainwashing, they could control the world.” The church plans to appeal the ruling to the U.S. Supreme Court if necessary. Paul Morantz, the attorney who was struck by the rattlesnake placed in his mailbox by the “Imperial Marines” of Synanon, gave pro-bono assistance to the plaintiffs in the Molko case.
“For me, it was a great decision for freedom of religion and to protect against the . . . use of coercive persuasion,” he said.
Morantz currently is defending Bent Corydon, author of the book “L. Ron Hubbard, Madman or Messiah” against a lawsuit by the Church of Scientology. He said he’s confident of how that case will turn out.
But he shares the belief of others on several sides of the multifaceted cult battle, in concluding that education rather than litigation should be the first defense of religious and intellectual liberty.
He’s not, however, optimistic.
“If anyone thinks they’re ever going to win this war, they’re wrong,” he said. “As long as we have human behavior, there will be sociopaths who will stand up and say ‘follow me.’ And there will always be searchers who will follow.”
**Updated with new information! Photo -illustrated interview with TEDDY HOSE, a former member of the Unification Church (the 'Moonies'), known for its unusua...
Here’s a second interview I did with Talk Beliefs highlighting my and my family’s choice to leave the Moonies, mental illness and suicide in cults, but also happy memories from the church, and turning my experiences into art, writing, and comedy. I appreciate that I can tell my story of the Unification Church through this platform, minus the more common media sensationalism 🙌
Liquidators are swiftly carrying out procedures against the former Unification Church, forcing the shutdown of branches, dormitories and ser
Ex-Unification Church branches closed, followers left adrift
THE ASAHI SHIMBUN
March 10, 2026 at 15:13 JST
A notice posted March 9 at the entrance of the headquarters of the Family Federation for World Peace and Unification in Tokyo’s Shibuya Ward reads, “Entry to this facility without the permission of the liquidator is prohibited.” (Yuki Hanano)
Liquidators are swiftly carrying out procedures against the former Unification Church, forcing the shutdown of branches, dormitories and services around the nation and sending its followers into disarray and sadness.
The church, officially called the Family Federation for World Peace and Unification, filed a special appeal with the Supreme Court on March 9 against the court-ordered dissolution.
However, the Tokyo High Court’s upholding of the Tokyo District Court’s order allowed the liquidation process to begin.
The government requested the dissolution order over the church’s long history of shady donation-collection practices. The courts agreed that the church had caused financial damage to followers and their families while also harming society.
Around noon on March 4, about an hour after the high court issued its decision, a group of about 20 liquidators, representatives and security guards entered the church’s headquarters in a high-end residential area of Tokyo’s Shibuya Ward.
According to a church official, the liquidators instructed staff to “cease operations” and requested passwords for computers and other equipment.
The work continued until about 7 p.m., when church employees were told to gather their personal belongings and leave the premises.
Since March 5, staff members have been instructed to remain on standby at home for possible summoning by the liquidators.
The church has also lost access to its official website and internal portal system, restricting its ability to issue public messages.
SHOCK HITS LOCAL CHURCHES
Liquidators have also entered the church’s approximately 280 other facilities nationwide and restricted entry.
At the Shimonoseki Family Church in Shimonoseki, Yamaguchi Prefecture, three men identifying themselves as “liquidator’s representatives” arrived at around 2 p.m. on March 4.
According to a church executive, the representatives explained the liquidation process and demanded bankbooks, cash, membership and donor lists, and the church keys.
A notice was then posted on the church door: “Entry to this facility without the permission of the liquidator is prohibited.”
The church executive said of the procedure: “It was like a seizure notice, and the shock was immense. I’ve been coming to this church for decades. I felt as if all my memories were being negated.”
DAILY LIFE UPENDED
Sunday services at the organization’s churches across Japan have also been halted.
On March 8, the first Sunday after the liquidation began, followers nationwide reportedly connected via a YouTube stream to worship from their homes.
Followers expressed a sense of profound loss.
“The church suddenly became unusable, and it feels like a part of my life has disappeared,” said a female follower in her 40s from the Shimonoseki church. “Gathering and talking with fellow believers is part of our religion, and we are truly struggling.”
Another female follower in her 60s said tearfully, “As time goes by, the sadness of not being able to see everyone grows.”
The church’s dormitories, which primarily house followers in their teens and 20s who have moved to Tokyo, have also been targeted in the liquidation.
With several dozen such dormitories nationwide, some residents are reportedly being forced to find new housing.
104 BILLION YEN IN ASSETS
Lawyer Hisashi Ito, the court-appointed liquidator, announced at a news conference on the night of March 4 that a team of “hundreds” of liquidators and representatives would visit churches nationwide to explain the procedures.
According to the high court’s decision, the church’s assets totaled 104 billion yen ($660 million) as of the end of fiscal 2024.
These assets will be managed by the liquidators, with a focus on victim compensation.
Guidelines from the Agency for Cultural Affairs issued last autumn anticipate a lengthy compensation process. The agency suggests allowing limited use of church facilities to soften the impact on religious activities.
Ito said any such use would be conditional on the church adhering to strict rules that do not interfere with the procedures.
LAWYERS WARN OF LOOPHOLE
The National Network of Lawyers Against Spiritual Sales, which handles cases of large-scale donations to the church, insists that the church’s “illegal activities need to be prevented.”
The group is concerned because the church has designated another religious corporation, Tenchi Seikyo in Obihiro, Hokkaido, to receive its remaining property upon dissolution.
The lawyers’ network warns that if the assets are transferred, there is a risk that “illegal donation solicitation activities” will continue.
(This article was written by Amane Shimazaki, Yosuke Takashima and senior staff writer Nobuya Sawa.)
Police have transferred Unification Church leader Han Hak-ja and three other church officials to the prosecution over their alleged involvem
Police transfer Unification Church leader to prosecution over alleged illegal political donations
By Yonhap
Published Dec 30, 2025 2:14 pm KST
Updated Dec 30, 2025 2:52 pm KST
<photo> Jeong Won-ju, center, former chief secretary of Unification Church leader Han Hak-ja, arrives at the National Police Agency's headquarters in western Seoul, Sunday. Yonhap
Police have transferred Unification Church leader Han Hak-ja and three other church officials to the prosecution over their alleged involvement in illegal political donations, officials said Tuesday.
Han, who is currently in custody over bribery charges involving former first lady Kim Keon Hee, was among the four suspects a special investigation team handed over the previous day.
The other suspects are Yun Young-ho, former head of the church's global headquarters, Jeong Won-ju, Han's former chief secretary, and Song Gwang-seok, a former head of the Universal Peace Foundation affiliated with the church.
They are accused of giving illegal donations to both ruling and opposition politicians in an organized way in early 2019. Police believe church officials made the donations under their names and were later reimbursed by the church.
Han is suspected of orchestrating the illegal donations, while the others are believed to have made the donations.
The church leader and Jeong are already standing trial on charges of making separate illegal donations to main opposition People Power Party lawmakers.
The move comes after the special investigation team launched on Dec. 10 to look into various allegations surrounding the church.
It is also investigating allegations that former Oceans Minister Chun Jae-soo and other politicians received luxury gifts or cash from the church between 2018 and 2020
____________________________________
Unification Church Uses Foundations, NGOs in Political Lobbying
The more details that come out about Yamagami's life and struggle, the more relatable and familiar he becomes.
Too many of us who grew up in the UC have parents who continue to donate exorbitant amounts for palaces, the liberation of ancestors, new dispensations of grace, a new providential period, and now even Hak Ja Han's legal fees. For many of us who have become critical of the church, many of our parents will hide the fact that they make these donations, even lying about it.
The fact that FFWPU leadership is in no way seeking major reforms or actively trying to combat the common mindset that led Yamagami's mother to be so intensely exploited is unsurprising. Hopefully this signals to some members, including the Second Generation, that this organization does not serve their families but instead the greedy interests of a few, and is thoroughly irredeemable.
The excerpt of an article below details some of Yamagami's final testimony, where he does apologize for the suffering he caused Abe's family, but also recognizes that "there was a positive aspect, at least for me and other victims of the church."
The prosecution and defense are planning to give their closing arguments at the next hearing on December 18, 2025.
From Asahi Shimbun's December 5, 2025 article, "Yamagami ends testimony with first apology to Abe’s family":
In the final words of his testimony, Tetsuya Yamagami for the first time apologized to the bereaved family of Shinzo Abe, saying he had no excuses for killing the former prime minister.
His words came at the 14th hearing of his murder trial at the Nara District Court on Dec. 4.
Yamagami, 45, had indicated he would apologize during testimony the previous day, when Abe’s widow, Akie Abe, was in attendance.
She was not present when Yamagami’s lawyer on Dec. 4 raised the topic at the end of a question-answer session that lasted 45 minutes.
The lawyer asks the defendant if he had planned to apologize at the end of the trial and make a statement after hearing other testimonies.
“Yes,” Yamagami responded.
The lawyer set the stage for Yamagami: “This is the final question. A person’s life was lost because of what you have done. Are there any words for that?” the lawyer asked.
After a silent pause, Yamagami responded with carefully chosen words.
“I felt no resentment against the family members of former Prime Minister Abe, including Ms. Akie Abe. There is no doubt that I made them suffer by killing him, as I also have lost my family,” Yamagami said.
In a trembling voice, he continued: “There is no room for excuses. I am very sorry for what I did.”
Yamagami has admitted to fatally shooting Abe with a homemade shotgun in Nara in July 2022 over his ties to the Unification Church.
The defendant said his mother’s heavy donations to the organization ruined his family and led him to poverty.
The lawyer had earlier asked Yamagami whether he felt the gravity of taking someone’s life.
Yamagami, who was apprehended immediately after the shooting, said he learned from media reports that Abe had died, so the death felt indirect.
However, after watching footage of the shooting in court, the severity of his actions sank in, he said.
The defendant was also questioned about the “social impact” of the incident.
After Yamagami was arrested, the Unification Church, now called the Family Federation for World Peace and Unification, came under scrutiny.
Its connections to lawmakers were exposed. The government also investigated complaints by believers and second-generation followers about the church’s shady activities and collection practices.
The Tokyo District Court in March this year ordered the dissolution of the church.
“Did you somehow predict the impact?” the lawyer asked.
“I couldn’t have predicted it, but I’m grateful that things turned out this way,” Yamagami said.
When it was prosecutors’ turn to question the defendant, they also touched on Yamagami’s feelings concerning the aftermath of the shooting.
“Did you have a desire to commit the incident and have it reported by the media?” a prosecutor asked.
“I think I did, in terms of inflicting damage on the church,” Yamagami said.
“Do you still hold a grudge against the church’s leader, Hak Ja Han?” a prosecutor asked.
“Not as strongly as before,” the defendant said.
Yamagami was then asked whether he thought the shooting incident was “good.”
“There was a positive aspect, at least for me and other victims of the church, but I can’t make any general statements,” he said.
When asked if he felt conflicted between doing the right thing and his emotions when he was making the gun, Yamagami paused briefly and said he believes that killing Abe was “wrong.”
However, when asked if he had felt that way at any point before the shooting, Yamagami said Abe was “not a completely unrelated person with the church, so I was unable to completely switch over.”
. . .
Hisashi Wada from the Japanese Red Cross Osaka Hospital, who conducted a psychiatric evaluation on the defendant, testified as a witness for the prosecution on Dec. 4.
Wada said he interviewed Yamagami 21 times and concluded the defendant had “no mental disorder.”
He noted that Yamagami quit his job and was about to go bankrupt in June 2022, just before the shooting of Abe.
Wada told the court that Yamagami had expressed “resistance” to his situation at the time, saying his “mother would be pleased (about his bankruptcy), believing it happened because he opposed the church.”
He said that when he asked the defendant if he attacked Abe because he couldn’t avoid bankruptcy, Yamagami said “yes” during an interview.
Wada said Yamagami’s mindset was shaped not only by a deep sense of failure since junior high school and his anger toward the church for breaking up his family but also by a strong feeling of pride that made him somewhat ashamed of his work as a “haken” temporary employee.
However, Wada concluded the direct motive of the crime was financial hardship.
It is unusual for a psychiatrist to testify in a trial in which the defendant’s mental competency is not in question.
Senior officials of Nara District Public Prosecutors Office explained that Wada was called as a witness to “explain the psychological processes that led to the crime.”
Related
November 13: Tetsuya’s Mother Testifies in Court
Tetsuya’s sister testifies in court: “The Unification Church changed my mother”
TOKYO (Kyodo) -- A Japanese court said Thursday that it will hand down the ruling in January on the man indicted over the 2022 fatal shootin
Japan court to deliver ruling on ex-PM Abe's shooter in January
Mainichi Japan
October 3, 2025
TOKYO (Kyodo) -- A Japanese court said Thursday that it will hand down the ruling in January on the man indicted over the 2022 fatal shooting of former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe.
•
The Nara District Court has released the trial schedule for the case of Tetsuya Yamagami, 45, comprising 19 sessions running from 2 p.m. on Oct. 28 to the ruling at 1:30 p.m. on Jan. 21.
Abe, Japan's longest-serving prime minister, was shot at close range with a handmade gun while giving a campaign speech in Nara, western Japan, on July 8, 2022, two days before the House of Councillors election.
Yamagami told investigators he bore a grudge against the Unification Church, a South Korea-based religious group known for aggressive donation solicitations, after his mother's large financial contributions caused his family financial ruin.
He targeted Abe, believing the former prime minister had links to the organization, according to investigative sources. The high-profile case also shed light on questionable ties between ruling Liberal Democratic Party lawmakers and the controversial group.
