n the democratic nation of Japan, adherence to a religion is now grounds for a ruling of mental instability.
On December 18, in a decision that marks a radical departure from international human rights standards, a Japanese court awarded a woman’s estranged daughter more than ¥64 million—by retroactively declaring her late mother’s religious faith a form of legal impairment.
The ruling follows a post–Shinzo Abe assassination redefinition of “illegality” that now treats ordinary religious donations as suspect, and has effectively stripped 600,000 members of the Family Federation for World Peace and Unification of their right to practice their religion.
Almost overnight, the Unification Church was recast as a dangerous “cult.”
On July 8, 2022, a shot rang out in Japan that felled former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe. Abe was not, however, the only casualty of the assassin’s bullet. Religious freedom in that democracy also perished simultaneously.
The alleged circumstances of the murder provided an ideal pretext for persecution. Reportedly disgruntled over his mother’s devotion to the Unification Church, the assassin targeted Abe because he was friendly to that faith. Anti-religious elements in Japan quickly seized on the incident and ultimately succeeded in having the church stripped of its legal status, and its parishioners stripped of their rights.
One of those parishioners had been a woman who joined the Unification Church. She loved and embraced it, filling a spiritual vacuum in her life. She expressed her religious devotion in many ways, including through voluntary donations.
To preempt familial friction, including between her eldest daughter, who opposed her mother’s involvement in the church, and her younger daughter, who had introduced her to the minority faith, she signed a notarized pledge in 2015. The document affirmed that the donations were made of her own free will and waived any right to a refund.
But her eldest daughter was incensed. She seized sole guardianship of her mother, then sued the church in 2017 on her mother’s “behalf.”
The lawsuit was so frivolous as to be laughable. The mother was of sound mind and had made her intentions crystal clear, prompting both the Tokyo District Court and the Tokyo High Court to dismiss the claims.
But that was before the 2022 assassination of Shinzo Abe.
Almost overnight, the Unification Church was recast as a dangerous “cult.”
In the wake of the hysteria, Japan’s Supreme Court shifted its definition of “illegality”—broadening it to include the Unification Church’s religious practice of soliciting donations from willing members.
With ordinary religious behavior thus criminalized, the eldest daughter’s original 2017 case was revived and reversed, with the court awarding her more than ¥64 million, ruling that the mother’s ability to make “appropriate judgments” had been impaired.
Her religious devotion was no longer a protected right but evidence of instability, the court claimed.
As attorney Yoshiro Ito said, in Japanese civil litigation, an “unwritten rule” is “if the defendants are labeled a cult, they lose.”
Religious scholar Massimo Introvigne put it more starkly: “In Japan, certain religious minorities do not enter the courtroom as equal citizens. They enter as defendants in a morality play whose ending was written long before the curtain rose.”
The mother had made her wishes clear more than a decade ago. She died in 2021, at the age of 91, four years after her daughter’s lawsuit was filed, a year before Abe’s assassination. At that time, her religion and its members still enjoyed their human rights.
Her voice forever silenced, she cannot protest the ruling.
Apparently death is no escape from persecution in Japan.
