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In March 1993, Japanese former Olympic gymnast Hiroko Yamasaki disappeared seven months after collaborating in a mass marriage ceremony ceremony organised by the Reverend Moon Solar-myung’s Unification Church in Seoul.
After an in depth police search, she instantly re-emerged from hiding 46 days later to explain her expertise by the hands of the church whose followers are generally often known as Moonies.
“Every thing was a mistake,” Yamasaki instructed reporters at a press convention. “I used to be positioned in a world of delusion the place folks’s minds have been being managed. So I nonetheless can not work out to what extent the love I felt in direction of [my husband] was actual.”
Thirty years after Yamasaki’s organized marriage, consideration has once more turned to the “world of delusion” allegedly inhabited by the Korean church’s followers.
Tetsuya Yamagami, the person suspected of killing Japan’s former prime minister Shinzo Abe final week, is reported to have been in search of revenge towards the church. His mom, who frequently attended church occasions, allegedly made ruinously massive donations.
Not a member of the church himself, Abe praised the church’s actions throughout a speech in September. His grandfather, former prime minister Nobusuke Kishi, is reputed to have helped the fiercely anti-communist church set up its foothold in Japan.
The alleged connection to the Abe assassination is the newest controversy for a church that has constructed a sprawling multibillion-dollar enterprise empire with pursuits starting from a Brazilian soccer membership to a Californian chinchilla ranch.
For followers and sympathisers, the church stays misunderstood and unfairly maligned. However to critics, it’s a cult that has used its religious maintain over followers to counterpoint the faith’s founding household.
“It’s a enterprise based mostly on faith,” mentioned Tak Ji-il, a professor at Busan Presbyterian College. “On the floor, they’re combating over non secular rules however they’re really combating over cash.”
Moon, an excommunicated Presbyterian minister born in what’s now North Korea, based the Unification Church within the South Korean metropolis of Busan in 1954.
He argued that Adam and Eve’s fornication had led to the prevalence of “egocentric love” all through the world. Jesus had been despatched to revive God’s like to the world, however died earlier than he had the possibility to marry.
As Jesus’s self-anointed successor, Moon described his mission as to marry, elevate the “supreme household”, and encourage his followers — whom he personally paired off forward of the mass weddings that made his motion well-known — to do the identical in order to “create one world underneath the sky”.
The religious depth and political idealism of Moon’s message, which targeted on overcoming racial, non secular and nationwide variations, resonated notably strongly with younger folks in Japan and the west.
“Ideologically, it was a type of non secular model of communism — we’re all one household of mankind, and the thought is to construct a unified world,” mentioned Michael Breen, a British public relations marketing consultant who was a member of the church between 1978 and 1982. “You felt you have been a part of one thing very noble and really healthful.”
However critics accuse church leaders of exploiting members’ labour and capital — together with billions of {dollars} transferred from Japan to the US — to construct and seed its enterprise empire.
Associates of Tongil Group, a South Korean conglomerate based by Moon in 1963, embrace ski, ocean and golf resorts, a building group, a defence firm, a chemical compounds group, an auto elements enterprise and a newspaper. Within the 2000s, the church entered right into a joint automotive manufacturing enterprise with the North Korean authorities.
The church’s US enterprise pursuits embrace the conservative Washington Occasions newspaper, the New Yorker lodge in New York, the True World Meals seafood wholesaler and an unlimited actual property portfolio.
In Japan, described by specialists because the principal supply of the church’s world wealth, the church has lengthy been dogged by allegations of forcibly extracting donations — a difficulty on the coronary heart of Yamagami’s alleged grievances towards the Moonies.
For many years, Japanese followers have engaged within the apply of promoting “religious items” similar to costly ginseng tea or miniature stone pagodas produced by church-affiliated enterprises in Korea.
At a press convention this week, the president of the Japanese department of the church acknowledged that it had forcibly extracted donations prior to now, however claimed that the apply had lengthy since ended.
However attorneys for former church members in Japan level to a 2020 Tokyo court docket choice that ordered the church to repay about $34,000 to a member on the grounds that “the demand for donations was made by way of an unfair methodology of stirring up anxiousness and concern”.
“I did every kind of part-time jobs to donate more cash to the church to fulfil a quota for every member for anniversaries and church occasions,” mentioned Lee Younger-sun, a Korean former member who runs an organisation helping victims of the church.
“In any other case, you’d be remoted inside the organisation and couldn’t endure the strain. They claimed to construct a paradise on earth however in actuality it was like residing in hell.”
Since Moon’s demise in 2012, his widow has been battling towards her sons for management of the church and management of its companies.
One son tried to grab management of the church’s US holding firm earlier than his mom wrestled it again from him after a decade-long court docket battle.
One other has established his personal breakaway church in Pennsylvania. Generally known as the “Rod of Iron Ministries”, it encourages followers carrying crowns of bullets to tout semi-automatic weapons throughout its ceremonies.
Breen mentioned that the divisions inside the household have been probably deadly for the motion. However whereas acknowledging the church’s many scandals, he rejected its widespread characterisation as a “cult”.
“All religions start as cults — folks have all the time feared these teams as a result of by definition they’re radical,” mentioned Breen, who’s writing his second biography of Moon and stays sympathetic to the motion.
“However in my expertise, the Moonies are very good folks — and you may depart any time you need.”
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