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N. Kondo: Address to Summit 2022, Session V
Written by Norishige Kondo, director of the FFWPU-Japan Legal Affairs Office
Friday, August 12, 2022
Address to Summit 2022 and Leadership Conference,
Seoul, Korea, August 11-15, 2022
Good afternoon. I'm really honored to be with you today. I want to talk about the kidnapping and confinement and forced conversions that are happening in Japan. This is what happened frequently before we changed the name of our organization from Unification Church to Family Federation for World Peace and Unification. In the past, there were more than 4,300 victims, but the Japanese media did not report on that.
[Mr. Kondo references a PowerPoint presentation] This picture shows Japanese FFWPU member Toru Goto, who is now the chair of the Japanese Victims’ Association against Religious Kidnapping and Forced Conversion, after being held captive for 12 years. Immediately after his release, he weighed about 50 kilograms (110 pounds); he was thin, emaciated. In the last months of his confinement, he was not given enough food. That's why he was emaciated.
Behind the kidnapping there were three entities that were opposed to the Unification Church. One was a group of Christian ministers. They said that the Unification Church was heretic.
The second group was an association of parents who were against Unification Church. This association argued that the Unification Church should give them back their children.
The third group was the leftist camp. This communist camp was against the Unification Church because the International Federation for Victory over Communism, an organization founded by Rev. Dr. Sun Myung Moon, was against communism.
Now let me turn to a brief history of forced conversion by Christian ministers. In 1966 the Christian pastor Satoshi Moriyama began de-converting Unification Church members. Ten years later he taught other Christian pastors his methods of kidnapping and forced conversion based on his ten years’ experience. In 1984 one of the activists, Takashi Miyamura, joined the Moriyama movement. He was involved in Toru Goto's case twice.
A lot of confinements were carried out in apartments. In 1987 the so-called Professional Deprogrammers in Japan, an anti-Unification Church council, was established to exchange information. In 1973, a parents’ association against the Unification Church was established. These are the important figures. The person in the middle is Takashi Maruyama. He raped a female Unification member during her detention.
Now let me turn to the movement of the leftist camp. In 1960 the communist ideology had spread in Japan, and in response the Reverend Moon and Dr. Hak Ja Han Moon established the International Federation for Victory over Communism in Japan in 1968. In 1978, thanks to the activity of IFVOC, the Communist Party lost the election. This enraged Genji Miyamoto, the chairman of the Communist Party, who then publicly declared a holy war against IFVOC and the Unification Church. Since than there were a lot of cases in which people were forced to convert while in detention, and the Church rescued them by submitting a habeas corpus claim to the court.
This shows the list of habeas corpus cases. Eleven were cases in which people were confined in the psychiatric ward of a hospital. Detention in a psychiatric ward was judged illegal, so from then on apartments were used as the main place for detention. Because of this a lot of tragedies took place. For example, a person confined in a sixth-floor apartment was severely injured when he tried to flee, and one person committed suicide during the confinement. There was a Christian minister who threatened a detainee with a knife during the confinement. A Unificationist couple were forcibly torn from their children during their detention, and a UC member who was torn from his wife and children during detention ended up in a divorce. There were severe symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder, and there were cases of prolonged confinement for about twelve years and five months.
This is the manual on how to kidnap and confine the victims. However, the kidnappers did not use those terms. They instead used the term “rescue” to justify their actions. This shows the number of confinement cases. You can see the two peaks in the middle. These are the cases when the mass media published negative articles against the Unification Church.
Now let me turn to the involvement of the lawyers association, the National Network of Lawyers against Spiritual Sales (NNLSS). They argue that they represent the detainees.
This diagram shows how the anti-UC movement works. The media publish anti-UC reports. Then, reading these articles, the family members consult the lawyers, and the lawyers help the families to take their adult children away from the Unification Church. And the anti-Unification Church lawyers are employed to file a lawsuit. The former members were faithful and devoted members, but after they left the Unification Church, they stated that they had been deceived. Because of this the Unification Church lost many cases. But through these cases the mass media again published anti-Unification Church reports, and the readers of the newspapers and the family members again consulted the anti-Unification Church lawyers. There was a vicious circle like this.
These are the major lawyers of NNLASS. They appeared in the media many times. First of all, Hiroshi Yamaguchi represented the Socialist Party of Japan in the Levchenko spy case. He also represented defendant Takashi Miyamura in Mr. Goto's case.
Let me briefly touch upon the Levchenko spy case. He was a KGB agent. In 1979 he defected to the United States. In 1982 he testified before a committee in the U.S. Congress. There's no law in Japan banning spy activities, so it was easy to act as an agent in Japan. That's what he said. And the chairman of the Committee of the Socialist Party was a collaborator, according to him. Then the Socialist Party stated that the Levchenko case was a collusion between the CIA and the International Federation for Victory over Communism.
In 1983 the International Federation for Victory over Communism filed several lawsuits against the Socialist Party. The lawyer representing the Socialist Party was Hiroshi Yamaguchi.
At the trial the International Federation for Victory over Communism won and the Socialist Party had to pay more than 2 million yen in compensation. At the time, Japan was a paradise for spies. Since 1979 there was a campaign to make preventive measures against spy activities. The Unification Church supported that campaign. The Socialist Party and the Communist Party objected to that campaign. In response, NNLASS was founded in 1987, and Hiroshi Yamaguchi, the attorney for the Socialist Party, became the general secretary of NNLASS.
Because of time limits I want to talk about the last point.
Former Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe was shot to death this year. There was a report that the suspect blamed Family Federation for World Peace and Unification. Mass media criticized this organization from an atheistic standpoint. They argued that the video message of Prime Minister Abe to the UPF event was problematic. They never reported on the context and the value of his message. The media also introduced detention as a success story, which served to encourage detention. It was a systematic and massive campaign against religious freedom.
I hope that you understand the serious social problem that Japanese people face today. Thank you very much for listening.
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