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Happiness ginseng from earth-conquering Moonies – Japan 1978

by John Roberts Far Eastern Economic Review June 23, 1978 pages 57, 59 and 60.

BROWSING through a Tokyo department store a few weeks ago, I was accosted by a young lady, clad in traditional Korean costume, selling ginseng extract. It was excellent — so good that I took the trouble to decipher the fine print on the label to learn the source. The name of the company — Shiawase Shoji (Happiness Company) [Happy World] — sounded vaguely familiar: it was an affiliate of the Holy Spirit Association for the Unification of World Christianity, otherwise known as the Unification Church. I had been touched (for a stiff ¥10,000 [US$44]) by the self-anointed “Reverend” Moon Sun Myung, founder and Messiah of the quasi-Christian evangelical creed that is out to conquer the earth. That was humiliating enough, but subsequently I learned that the Unification Church was really an organ of the Korean Central Intelligence Agency and possibly nurtured by the American CIA.

It is all too easy to become ensnared by the ubiquitous Moon Machine, whose moving parts are known by a variety of names. In the US and internationally there are (or were) the Korean Cultural and Freedom Foundation, Day of Hope, Radio of Free Asia, Pioneer Academy, Asian People’s Anticommunist League, International Conference for Unity of the Sciences, Project Unity, One World Crusade, National Prayer and Fast for the Watergate Crisis, American Youth for a Just Peace (in Vietnam), Korean Folk Ballet, Little Angels of Korea, Freedom Leadership Foundation, International Congress for World Peace, Diplomatic National Bank, the News World and so on.

In Japan, most of the names are different. The Unification Church is known variously as Sekai Toitsu Kyokai, Toitsu Genri, or Genri Undo, with numerous variations. The main adjuncts or manifestations of the Church are the Kokusai Shokyo Rengo (International Federation for Victory over Communism or IFFVOC), which is essentially the Japanese chapter or counterpart of the World Anticommunist League/Asian People’s Anticommunist League (WACL/ APACL); and the Genri Group under which various student activities are conducted.

At the master controls is [Osami] Kuboki, a person of obscure antecedents. He is president of the Church, the IFFVOC, and also the International Cultural Foundation. As Henry O. Kuboki he is listed as a large stockholder in the Moon-affiliated Diplomat National Bank in Washington. Many other organizations are under the tight rein of Kuboki and Moon’s inner circle.

In a top position is Professor Juitsu Kitaoka, a leader of the United Nations Association and member of several pro-American rightist organizations. He is described as a violent anti-communist advocating rearmament, stronger police powers and capital punishment for communists, according to Ivan Morris, an authority on the Japanese right wing. Kitaoka is a long-time associate of Dr Tetsuzo Watanabe, a former film tycoon whose ideas are no less violent. Organiser of the APACL in Japan, Watanabe became international president of the WACL/APACL, the IFFVOC’s alter ego. Watanabe was closely connected with US Army intelligence and maintained relations with prominent McCarthyites in the US.

Pastor Moon Sun Myung boasts a flock of 2,000,000 believers in 120 countries, with 380,000 in South Korea, 300,000 in the US and 260,000 in Japan. [Some reports in the US state there were never more than 6,000 core members in the 1970s.] But some of the church’s official figures are mutually contradictory and there is little correspondence between the figures of headquarters and the branches.

It claimed a membership of 260,000 in 455 congregations throughout Japan in 1976. This would make it about 1/40th the size of Soka Gakkai, the largest of Japan’s “new religions.” The IFFVOC, the movement’s action corps, purports to have some 300,000 members and appears to comprise the WACL/APACL though the latter has a separate existence on paper. Less numerous than either the spiritual or the action arms, but perhaps more important ideologically, is the student contingent which has been called, variously, Genri Undo (Principles Movement), Genri Kenkyukai (Principles Research Society) and Genri Group. Genri Group says it has about 5,000 hard-core members but that it can mobilise 15,000 members at one time and is the second largest student group following the Communist Party-affiliated Democratic Youth League, the Japan Times reported in 1977.

▲ Pastor Moon at New York’s Yankee Stadium.

But there is something odd here. Genri Group claims to be growing, yet in 1971 the same Japan Times reported that Genri Kenkyukai had 33,000 members nationwide. Is it growing or shrinking?

At any rate, the student and youth movement is what the Moon Machine is all about. Genri Undo was established in Japan in 1960, the year of the great student uprising against the US-Japan military alliance. At that time, the student movement was firmly under the control of Zengakuren (the militant students group), which in turn was under strong Communist Party influence. Moral Rearmament (MRA) made strong and subtle attempts to win over the Zengakuren students to an anti-communist position, but its bland, middle-class image was not appealing. One hypothesis is that the cruder, more fanatical approach of Moon and his allies was considered to be more effective. The rise of Genri Undo accompanied the gradual decline and fragmentation of Zengakuren.

Of course, Genri Undo did not do all this alone. The full weight of the Government, the police and the legal system bore down on the universities which formerly had enjoyed considerable autonomy. Genri leaders, by their own admission, have been collaborating with the KCIA, and their movement worked in alliance with other student organizations, notably the centrist Soka Gakkai and ultra-nationalist groups such as underworld boss Yoshio Kodama’s Youth Thought Study Society, and of course the IFFVOC, established jointly by Moon and gambling czar Ryoichi Sasakawa in 1967 with the participation of several prewar ultranationalist, terrorist and underworld bosses. Later, however, under president Sasakawa, a more presentable line-up of complaisant politicians, businessmen and scholars was mustered.

▲ Left to right: Won-bok Choi (a ‘second wife’ of Moon), Hak Ja Han, Sun Myung Moon, Ryoichi Sasakawa, unknown, Hyo-won Eu (who wrote the 1957 Divine Principle and was the main lecturer and organizer of the UC in Korea in the late 1950s and 1960s) and Osami Kuboki (leader of the UC of Japan) at Gimpo airport, Seoul.

The IFFVOC was based originally on Sasakawa’s Federation of Motorboat Racing Associations, which grosses US$5 billion a year and employs tens of thousands of people, mostly young men. It appears that the IFFVOC serves Sasakawa as a private police force for his motor-boat courses and also assists his favourite conservative candidates during their election campaigns. Sasakawa’s remarks indicate that he considers it as a patriotic militia in reserve for political crises, similar to Hitler’s brownshirts and the uniformed militarist party that Sasakawa, a self-proclaimed fascist, organized during the 1930s.

Not overlooking the university faculties, the Moon Machine established the World Peace Academy (WPA) in South Korea, Taiwan and Japan. The Japan Chapter, set up in 1974, is reported to include among its consultants James Stewart of the Asia Foundation (an old CIA front) and Masahide Kanayama, a paid lobbyist of the South Korean Government and allegedly of the KCIA. One of the WPA’s activities is the International Congress for World Peace, to be held in Japan this summer under the co-sponsorship of the International Cultural Foundation (ICF), another Moon front. The WPA seems to have enlisted the active support or participation of the potent Japan Federation of Employers Associations, the Japan Productivity Centre, the Nomura Research Institute and the Mitsubishi Research Institute in its National Goals project for the study of Japan’s strategy in the 1980s.

▲ UC members who sold Yewha guns

The Moon Machine in Japan operates a number of commercial ventures, which include trading companies, tourist agencies and publishing enterprises. In addition to the Happiness Company [Happy World] mentioned above there is a trading firm known as Toitsu Sangyo (Unification Industries) which raised eyebrows several years ago by importing several hundred shotguns and powerful air rifles manufactured by the Reverend Moon’s munitions factories in South Korea which assemble M-16 rifles on a knockdown basis under US licence and manufacture parts for the same weapons. Significantly, the shotguns and air rifles mentioned above were imported for the militant IFFVOC, presumably to be used (when Der Tag / The Day comes) against targets whom the Messiah chooses to designate as communists.

According to the church, Toitsu Sangyo has 30 employees and a turnover of US$7 million from machinery, building materials, firearms, and allegedly some narcotics. Shiawase Shoji, with 30 employees and a turnover of US$17 million, handles health food, aphrodisiacs and art objects. Profits must be high, because the markup on ginseng is astronomical and most of the work (except book-keeping) is done by unpaid Moonies.

The Unification Church in Japan declared an income of about ¥3 billion in 1975. Most of it was from members who contribute 10% of their monthly earnings to it. The action arm, IFFVOC, claims that its activities are supported by dues of ¥1,000 monthly from each of 380,000 members. In 1975, that could have added up to US$16 million exclusive of other sources such as a grant of US$160,000 from the church. But here again, the official spokesmen are conflicting and ambiguous.

▲ Ryoichi Sasakawa: Self-proclaimed fascist. Seen here with Mussolini

This picture is admittedly no more than an out-of-focus snapshot of the tip of the iceberg. Some of the Japan connections have been revealed or hinted at in the Koreagate investigations, but so far there has been no general exposé of what informed observers regard as a long-standing conspiracy of the KCIA and its extensions, including the Unification Church, to corrupt and subvert the Japanese Government. However, it has been reported that 200 Japanese right-wing politicians receive financial support from the Unification Church and its affiliates, or directly from the KCIA. This may be an understatement since at least 2,000 prominent Japanese politicians, businessmen and scholars as well as underworld bosses lend their support to Moon’s movement.

Let it not be thought that these adherents to the movement are gullible Moonies. They tend more towards Shintoism and conservative Buddhism than to evangelical Christianity, but those whose ideology is identifiable have certain familiar traits in common. For one thing, they loathe communism, an ideology that they tend to confuse with liberalism, and they are not fastidious about the means used in suppressing what they call dangerous thought, especially when profits or boodle [ = money, especially that gained or spent illegally or improperly] are involved.

Japanese reporting on the doings of the Moon Machine has been so scanty as to suggest a taboo in the daily press. However, one weekly magazine, Shincho, gave a glimpse of the upper-crust of Moonism that provides some idea of the cult’s influence. The event, said to be the largest banquet ever held at the Imperial Hotel, took place on May 7, 1974. It was hosted by the executive committee of The Day of Hope (Japan). (Its chairman, former prime minister Nobusuke Kishi, has been a leading figure in the WACL/APACL also.)

▲ Sun Myung Moon with Nobusuke Kishi (center); on the right is Osami Kuboki.

The guest of honour was Moon himself, and 1,700 prominent Japanese showed up to hear him speak. The guest list was not published, and the press was rigorously excluded, but among those reported present was (then) finance minister Takeo Fukuda, now Prime Minister. It is believed that most of the guests were executives doing business with South Korea (or ROK) and Taiwan, and conservative dietmen belonging to groups comprising the ROK-Taiwan lobby.

In this respect, it must be remembered that Kishi has long headed the Japan-ROK Cooperation Council through which most big deals between the two countries must be channelled if they are to be concluded successfully. And it is no accident that the principal figures in the council have been leaders or front men in a succession of very similar right-wing organizations from 1950s onward.

It may be recalled that Kishi, once a key figure in General Tojo’s World War II cabinet, became one of the most passionate spokesmen for Dr Frank Buchman’s Moral Rearmament (MRA) in 1950s and 1960s. The striking similarity between the moral precepts and secular programmes of MRA and Moon’s church is of interest here because the latter was born as an international movement at the very time when MRA was swiftly declining in Japan. Following the upheaval over the Security Treaty in 1960, which forced his resignation as prime minister, Kishi declared with characteristic hyperbole: “But for Moral Rearmament, Japan would be under communist control today.” Curiously, little was heard about MRA after the early 1960s. Instead, there was much bombast about the Asian People’s Anticommunist League, in which Kishi played the same role as elder statesman and spokesman. There are reports that in 1959 or thereabouts Moon played go-between for an alliance between the MRA leadership and the APACL. When the World Anticommunist League and IFFVOC were formed in the late 1966 and 1967 respectively, Kishi again came to the fore, and today he is front man for the Day of Hope.

page 60: So how did Moon, a country preacher with a criminal record, get into this high-powered act? Only recently, from a well qualified source, I found a plausible answer. In 1959 a confidant and disciple of Moon established the first mission of the Unification Church in Japan. This missionary, whose name is given as Choi Sang-Ik [Papasan Choi] had been held for deportation as an illegal entrant. A benefactor appeared in the person of Ryoichi Sasakawa who wrote a letter of guarantee for Choi, who in turn went out to propagate the faith in Japan and more recently has been an official of the Unification Church in the US.

▲ Choi Sang-Ik (aka Papasan Choi) with his wife in Tokyo.

The Moon Machine’s sponsorship by the KCIA is attested by a CIA report dated February 26, 1965 which states: “Kim Chong Pil organised (sic) the Unification Church . . . while director of the ROK Central Intelligence Agency and has been using the church, with a membership of 27,000, as his political tool.” It is quite clear that the invasion by President Park’s secret police was condoned and facilitated by Japanese military, police and intelligence authorities who have been fully aware of the Moon Machine’s illegal activities in collusion with the KCIA for years.

The situation is like that in the US where trespasses of the same elements have long been under benign scrutiny by the various intelligence authorities, as demonstrated by the voluminous government-sourced documentation presented during the Koreagate investigation. But observation of illegal activity without intervention is tantamount to collusion or obstruction of justice, and in that sense we can say that the American CIA, FBI and State Department have been accessories to the misdeeds of the Moon Machine. Revelations of the Fraser and Jaworski committees somehow stopped at the water’s edge when it came to exposing well-documented Korean depredations in Japan. Perhaps for diplomatic reasons, the US Government preferred to confine its investigation to events that occurred in the US, ignoring the fact that the Korean scandal is trilateral, with operations that involve and affect all three countries.

Also conspicuously absent from the investigation is evidence linking the CIA with the KCIA, its creation, and its grandchild, the Unification Church.

In court of law, the existence of such a link could not be proved but clues are everywhere. One of them is a series of documents (Supplement to Part 4) submitted in the March 1968 hearings of the Zablocki Committee. They concern a William A. Curtin Jr. and the Korean Freedom and Cultural Foundation. Curtin, an Army intelligence colonel, had been attached to the office of the Secretary of Defence. In 1959-60, he served a tour as adviser to the South Korean Army. In September 1960, he made a brief official trip to Japan and South Korea “where he met various ranking Korean government officials.”

His activities until his retirement in 1962 are not specified, but thereafter he devoted his time to conning prominent Americans into lending their names or financial support to the non-existent Korean Cultural and Freedom Foundation (KCFF). This was nominally to promote friendly relations between the two countries in commemoration of the Korean War, but in practice it was used to raise funds for propaganda, suborning [bribe or otherwise induce (someone) to commit an unlawful act such as perjury] of American politicians and funding KCIA operations in Japan and Korea as well as the US, according to Department of Justice reports.

▲ Yoshio Kodama: Lockheed problems.

The foundation was formally registered in 1964 by Curtin (vice-president) and two American dummy directors. Astonishingly, the two honorary presidents were real presidents — Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower — and the KCCF president was Admiral Arleigh Burke of World War II fame.

The honorary chairman of KCFF was Kim Jong Pil, founder of the KCIA who used the Unification Church as his tool. Serving as vice-presidents were Dr Yang Yu Chan, ROK ambassador to Washington, and (later) Pak Bo Hi, the Reverend Moon’s right-hand man. The board of directors and advisory board — more than 100 persons in all — is a veritable roster of the American political and financial elite. How Curtin, reported by the FBI to be a dipsomaniac and a sick man (he died in 1965), could have assembled such a brilliant array of supporters is puzzling indeed. Probably, the dignitaries did not inquire too deeply into the affairs of the organization whose overt activities included the promotion of the Little Angels of Korea choral group and financial support for the APACL Freedom Centre (APACLFC) in Seoul, which was also a client of Asia Foundation. According to KCCF president Burke, the objectives of the APACLFC were “to pull together cold war specialists from many countries and give training to Asian peoples which will enable them to defend themselves from communist imperialism …”

Another project of KCCF was Radio of Free Asia (ROFA), established in 1966 with General Dwight Eisenhower, Admiral Burke, and Ambassador Chang as honorary heads and Pak Bo Hi as executive director. On the advisory council were six senators, 12 congressmen and eight state governors as well as Richard Nixon and Ed Sullivan. ROFA raised political funds for dubious destinations and beamed pro-American propaganda to Asia during the Vietnam War. The US Department of Justice heard many complaints about ROFA (some emanating from CIA sources) and in 1971 showed signs of investigating it on suspicion of violating the Foreign Registration Act and abusing its privileges as a tax-free foundation. Through divine providence or other means, Pak Bo Hi secured the legal services of Robert Amory Jr, former deputy director of the CIA and a law partner of Thomas G. Corcoran, an adviser to the CIA and a prominent lobbyist for the ROK and Taiwan. The Justice Department dropped the investigation like a radioactive potato, and the KCFF and ROFA continued their work for the KCIA unmolested until the Koreagate investigation brought them out into the shrivelling glare of public opinion.

These revelations do not tell us who or what is behind the Moon Machine’s brash operations in Japan. However, the Fraser Committee in Washington has been under increasing pressure from some quarters to investigate not only the US angle but also corrupt US-Tokyo-Seoul connections.

Some people want to know, for example, why Pak Bo Hi delivered US$3,000 in US$100 bills to Fumiko Ikeda, a Unification Church lecturer, at the office of the Little Angels group in Seoul — on orders from a KCIA chief in Washington. They would like to know also under what circumstances Pak, on several occasions, allegedly brought large sums of cash (as much as US$70,000 per trip) from Tokyo to Washington for investment in the Diplomat National Bank.

And how is it that Mitsuharua Ishii, the president of Toitsu Sangyo — and concurrently publisher of the Church’s Sekai Nippo (World Daily News) claiming 235,000 readers — is listed as a big stockholder in Diplomat National Bank? Whose money is it, and what is it used for?

As these bits of information fester, there are predictions in Washington that this month the Fraser Committee will at last drop the other shoe and expose some of these trilateral capers — possibly to the mortification of Japan’s ruling party. █ __________________________________

A Memoir from the Early Period of the Unification Church of Japan By Rev. Sudo – Page 14

…Mr. (Papa San) Choi…had made a connection with Mr. Sasagawa (a powerful right-wing multi-millionaire businessman, head of the Motorboat Association of Japan)…by the 11th of June, 1963…we began the training session in the motorboat race-camp building that could accommodate more than one hundred trainees…This Toda Training Center was where I worked as a lecturer until the end of my mission in training. (During this period, most of the present Japanese church leaders and members came through these training sessions and decided to join full time. This extensive list included Mr. Oyamada, Mr. Kamiyama, Mr. Furuta, Mr. Sakurai, Mr. Kajikuri, Mr. Ohta and a little later, Dr. Shirnmyo and Dr. Masuda.)

The training session at Toda Center continued until July, 1965.

http://www.tparents.org/Library/Unification/Publications/TodaysWorld/TodaysWorld-91/TodaysWorld-9110.pdf

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Ryoichi Sasagawa Interview

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UcRAAMsnmYE

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How Sun Myung Moon bought protection in Japan

Asian ginseng – there is currently no conclusive evidence supporting any health benefits

How Rev. Moon’s ‘Snakes’ Infested the US by Robert Parry

6,500 Japanese women missing from Moon mass weddings