Our Crisis in Democracy: A View from Japan

It’s frightening to think of history repeating itself.

An ultranationalist religious cult with adherents at the highest levels of the Japanese state; the details are “straight out of a manga”. Yet the shooting of Shinzo Abe in July, by a man who lost his family to the cult-like practices of the Unification Church, has shone a light on the worrying ease with which fringe religion can infiltrate mainstream politics—and not only in Japan, argues Fuminori Nakamura, but in embattled democracies across the world. With Abe’s state funeral held earlier this week, this essay—the first in a new series of translated opinion pieces we are hosting in our Saturday columnsounds the alarm at an important time.

The relationship between politics and religion in Japan is deeply rooted.  When considering the current iteration of the Unification Church’s connections with Japanese politics, it brings to mind the era in the 1930s when Japan was progressively listing toward war with the United States.  Before getting into that, however, first allow for a brief review of the attack on Japan’s former prime minister, Shinzo Abe.

On July 8, 2022, Mr. Abe was shot and killed while giving an endorsement speech ahead of the national election. The suspect who fired the gun is a forty-one-year-old man, Tetsuya Yamagami. His family was destroyed by cumulative donations his mother had made as a member of the Unification Church. Allegedly his intention had been to target the current leader of the church, Hak Ja Han Moon, the widow of the founder of the Unification movement, but he targeted Mr. Abe instead because he was, to use Yamagami’s own words, “the most influential person who was sympathetic to the Unification Church.” (Author’s note:  Though in Japan it is still referred to as “the former Unification Church,” the church changed its name to the Family Federation for World Peace and Unification, but to avoid confusion I will use its previous designation.)

Since the incident, the depth of the Unification Church’s relationship with, in particular, the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) is increasingly clear. In Japan, the Unification Church is considered a cult: among their practices, the church tells followers that their ancestors are suffering in the next world and compel them to buy exorbitantly priced jars called “tsubo” (for several million yen) and scriptures called “seihon” (for ¥30,000,000, which is about 50,000 times the cost of a paperback edition of one of my novels in Japan). They also conduct mass weddings where members marry someone chosen for them by the church. Ostensibly, they advocate rather strongly for conservative and right-wing causes. In their desire to rewrite Japan’s pacifist constitution that includes a renunciation of war in order to empower the military as well as their refusal to acknowledge the rights of LGBTQ people, the church bears a strong affinity with the LDP. This has enabled a cult to infiltrate the center of Japan’s politics. Reports about the church’s ties with high-ranking officials within Japan’s National Police Agency as well as the chairman of the Public Safety Commission depict a world straight out of a manga.

Returning to the beginning of this essay, I think about what happened in 1931. In what is known as the Manchurian Incident, the Japanese Imperial Army detonated an explosion on the South Manchuria Railway, over which Japan claimed authority, and then accused the Chinese of committing the act, as a pretext for the invasion of Manchuria. This event would drag Japan and China into a morass that led, ultimately, to the Second Sino-Japanese War. Japan occupied part of China, establishing the state of Manchukuo and installing a puppet regime, which even put Japan at odds with the United States over their interests in China. Historically, the Manchurian Incident is cited as a major turning point in the lead-up to Japan’s involvement in World War II.  And yet, this was not led by the Japanese government, acting as a nation—this was initiated by the recklessness of a small number of officers in the Japanese Imperial Army. One could argue that Japan as a country was dragged along by the designs of a subset of army officers but, in fact, the purported key plotter of the Manchurian Incident, Kanji Ishiwara, was an adherent of a certain religion.

At that time, Japan was dominated by state-sponsored Shintoism with the Emperor at its center, and other religions such as Christianity and Buddhism faced repression. However, there is photographic evidence of an event that took place in Manchukuo, at which a banner that hangs grandly in the room displays the words, “Nam Myoho Renge Kyo,” the mantra that is chanted within all forms of Nichiren Buddhism, supposedly an oppressed religion back then. Nichiren is seen as a branch of Buddhism (though far removed from traditional Buddhism), but this religion that exerted an influence over Ishiwara has a strongly ultranationalist ideology.

Historians disagree about how definitively this religious ideology is related to the Manchurian Incident. Even so, the potential influence on a subset of reckless army officers of a religious ideology completely distinct from the then-dominant state-sponsored Shintoism in Japan should not be underestimated. It makes it appear that the entire country was caught up with this one religion. (As those who have read my novel, Cult X, may have noticed, the plot that is attempted by the cult leader Sawatari in that book is an allegory of this historical event, reprised in present day.)

But, returning to where we are now. The Unification Church is far from a mainstream religion in Japan. Yet a religion such as this has worked its way into Japan’s center; it has had an impact.  One religion has the potential to implicate the whole. It’s frightening to think of history repeating itself.

This is not only a problem in Japan. I don’t know how it was reported abroad, but one of Japan’s major television networks ran an interview with Allen Tate Wood, a former top American political leader of the Unification Church. According to Wood, after their presidencies ended Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush were each paid US$1 million for speeches that they gave to the Unification Church. The church also later provided support to George W. Bush and Donald Trump. These payments may have come from profits from the Church’s business in the United States, however, there’s no way to trace the origin of these funds. For instance, it’s possible that those million-dollar payments included money obtained from the church’s countless Japanese adherents who suffered financial ruin after buying ornamental jars and seals to atone for their ancestors’ sins. Even more distressing, it was reported in Japan that Hyung Jin Moon, also known as Sean Moon, the youngest son of Sun Myung Moon, the founder of the Unification Church—now the founder of a schismatic sect of his father’s movement—was among the Trump supporters who stormed the Capitol on January 6th.

So then, it really can’t be said that there is no danger of the whole system being implicated by one religion.

Lastly, I’d like to address the influence in Japan of religions other than the Unification Church.  These religions’ doctrines may be incompatible with the LDP’s right-wing ideology, and yet when it’s election time, they collaborate with the LDP. I’ve never understood this, so when I had the chance to speak with a religion scholar, I asked him about it. He knows a lot about religion, and according to him, “The devout vote LDP.” I found this even more confusing. I expected that the more devout they are, the more familiar they would be with religious doctrine, and thus they would know that it’s incompatible with the LDP. When I said as much to him, his brusque reply was, “They tell them it’s a virtuous deed.”

In other words, their religion instructs them that voting for the LDP is a good thing. Meaning that they relinquish their own ideas and entrust their political views to the leaders of their religious group. If those leaders say something is good, then it is good. This reminds me of how, in Christianity, when believers ask if G-d has abandoned them in this cruel world, the priest’s response is that God’s love is immeasurable. Religious teachings and the LDP’s policies are incompatible. And yet, voting for them is deemed a good thing. How strange. But “God’s love is immeasurable.”

Is this really democracy?

I respect the world’s traditional religions. But I sincerely believe that we need to reexamine the relationship between religion and politics. That is, of course, not limited to the Unification Church.

The suspect Yamagami who allegedly shot and killed Mr. Abe did so with a homemade gun.  I wrote a novel called The Gun. In it, the protagonist has found a gun that he keeps for himself and is tormented by whether to fire it. From the shadows, he aims it at someone but he lacks the courage to follow through with it. But then a different person stands directly in front of where the protagonist is hiding, with their back facing him. The protagonist despairs for the duration of this moment, when this opportunity to fire the gun suddenly presents itself, but what must have this been like for Yamagami?

It took a very long time for him to resolve to commit the crime, then to change how to go about it, and ultimately to carry it out. I can imagine that has to do with his years of indecision over the crime. But due to security lapses, former Prime Minister Abe was exposed from behind when he was giving his speech. And there was Yamagami.

How did he feel in that situation? Was he exhilarated when he realized he had the shot?  Or did he despair at the thought? Perhaps, in the midst of his despair, he took a step, and then another, and moved closer to Mr. Abe.

It’s all too late, but I wish I could ask Yamagami. He didn’t need to have done that.

Translated from the Japanese by Allison Markin Powell

Fuminori Nakamura has won numerous prizes for his writing, including Japan’s prestigious Ōe Prize and the Akutagawa Prize, as well as the David L. Goodis Award for Noir Fiction. The Thief, his first novel to be translated into English, was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. His other novels include Cult X, The Gun, The Kingdom, My Annihilation, Evil and the Mask, The Boy in the Earth and Last Winter, We Parted.

Allison Markin Powell is a literary translator, editor, and publishing consultant based in New York City.

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