Japan’s ruling Liberal Democratic Party continues to be plagued by associations with the former Unification Church (UC), which, of course, was the main source of the resentments that allegedly led a man to assassinate former LDP president and prime minister Shinzo Abe in 2022. The South Korea-based church is officially known as the Family Federation for World Peace and Unification (FFWPU), a name change implemented in 1994. The FFWPU no longer wields the power it once did in Korea and its leader, Han Hak-ja, the wife of the late founder of the UC, Moon Sun-myung, is something of a pariah there. In Japan, a country that Moon supposedly despised and exploited accordingly, the former UC has always been a political and social force to reckon with, mainly by getting close to the LDP. Abe, in fact, inherited the group’s grip on his party from his grandfather, former prime minister Shinsuke Kishi, who first made friends with the church back in the 1960s.

The latest revelations, while reported to a certain extent by the Japanese press, were broken by the Korean newspaper Hankyoreh, which came into possession of “reports” written by Eiji Tokuno, the head of Japan operations of the FFWPU. These regular and detailed reports were directly sent to Han, referred to in the missives as True Mother, and describe Tokuno’s meetings with various LDP leaders, including Abe, over the years in a bid to reinforce the organization’s influence over the party by lending the LDP “support” for candidates in various general elections. NHK and Asahi Shimbun have said that the FFWPU will not confirm whether such reports exist and thus have offered no comment on what Hankyoreh and another Korean media outlet, Yonhap News Service, revealed in their reporting. 

According to Yonhap, Tokuno reported to Han 220 times between 2018 and 2022, laying out how he and the church “supported” 290 LDP members as candidates in the 2021 Lower House general election, support that he said was successful and which was greatly appreciated by Abe and the rest of the LDP leadership. (It should be noted that the UC and FFWPU have been known to support candidates from other Japanese parties as well, as long as those candidates align ideologically with UC’s anti-communist, pro-family agenda.) 

In October, Asahi Shimbun reported on the indictments of Kim Keon-hee, the wife of disgraced former South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol; an aide to Yoon; and Han, who is accused of giving illegal gifts to Kim and the aide while Yoon was president. The charges were made by a special prosecutor, which is different from the regular state prosecutor in that the special prosecutor is brought in to investigate wrongdoing at the executive level, since regular prosecutors are authorized at the executive level and thus are susceptible to undue influence. The gifts Han provided, which violated South Korea’s political funds law, were made through an intermediary to curry influence with Yoon’s People Power Party, which Han supported by telling her followers to vote for it. The aide was indicted first for receiving 144 million won from FFWPU, and later Kim, who received an expensive necklace and luxury handbag in July 2022 from Han. 

Hankyoreh, through its coverage of the indictment and related court proceedings, was able to obtain the Tokuno reports from Korean police. The reports describe how Tokuno first met with executives of FFWPU in Korea in Feb. 2018, where he explained the “give-and-take function” between the Japanese branch of the church and the Japanese political world, mainly by establishing political support groups (koenkai) that would target specific politicians and “educate” them with regard to UC/FFWPU ideology. In turn, these politicians would participate in FFWPU events and make “congratulatory messages” for the sake of FFWPU and Han. Many of these messages, including those from Abe and U.S. President Donald Trump, who reportedly were paid hundreds of thousands of dollars for them, have already circulated online in the wake of Abe’s assassination. 

What’s notable about this give-and-take relationship is that it seems to have been very successful in Japan and that Tokuno recommended it to his Korean counterparts because the church had not only lost its religious status in Korea, but was generally mistrusted by the Korean public, owing, at least in part, to enmity from other nominally Christian churches and organizations. Evidence of this dynamic is the Nikkan Tunnel project, which endeavors to construct an undersea tunnel between Japan and the Korean peninsula. The tunnel was always a pet project of UC founder Moon, and has received almost no support in Korea but considerable support in Japan thanks mainly to the efforts of the Japan branch of UC/FFWPU. 

The “honeymoon” between the FFWPU and the LDP “peaked,” according to Tokuno, during a 20-minute meeting between Abe and executives of the Japan branch on July 2, 2019, three weeks before the Upper House general election. Abe was already primed to appreciate the church’s activities through his grandfather, who was a member of the International Federation for Victory Over Communism, a UC-affiliated organization. In fact, the meeting was Abe’s idea, since he wanted FFWPU to help elect LDP candidate Tsuneo Kitamura, a former reporter for right-wing daily Sankei Shimbun. Kitamura’s chances were considered slim at the time, and Abe thought that the FFWPU could use its network to ensure “at least 200,000 votes” for Kitamura as a proportional candidate. The gambit worked. Kitamura won, and he later visited FFPWU’s Japan headquarters in Tokyo to offer his thanks. 

Since then, Tokuno continued to promote FFPWU’s ability to muster votes so as to further push the organization’s agenda on the LDP and “build a relationship of trust” with the party. Eventually, he got 19 LDP politicians to sign up for the tunnel plan, one of whom even traveled to Korea to promote the tunnel to Korean lawmakers. 

However, the honeymoon effectively ended with Abe’s assassination. At the time, Tokuno was working on supporting the candidacy of Yoshiyuki Inoue in the upcoming Lower House general election, but after Abe was killed and he learned that the alleged perpetrator was the son of a church follower, he deleted all related data in their records by order of headquarters. (FFPWU now denies that the alleged assassin was ever an actual member.) The report to True Mother for that day discussed the church’s relationship with Abe and the possibility that the church would be blamed for his death, which might mean the church would lose its coveted status as a religious corporation in Japan and with it its tax exemption.

That supposition came true last March, when the Tokyo District Court issued an order to dissolve FFPWU for causing significant harm through the kind of forced donations that many believe led to the Abe assassination. The organization still functions, but without its tax-exempt religious corporation status. The FFPWU, of course, immediately appealed the ruling, but what’s ironic is that the order was requested by the government, meaning the LDP, as a means of quelling public outrage over the church following the Abe assassination. 

Which isn’t to say that the party has completely abandoned the UC. According to Hankyoreh, the name of Sanae Takaichi, the current Japanese prime minister, appears in the reports 32 times, mainly because of her close relationship with her mentor, Shinzo Abe. Tokuno repeatedly reports that he has a close relationship with Takaichi’s koenkai (which he mistakenly places in Kanagawa Prefecture; Takaichi’s base is Nara) and at one point expresses “hope” that either Takaichi or Fumio Kishida would win the LDP presidency in 2021. Kishida won that election, and Takaichi in 2025, so both wishes came true. What the latter can do for him and his church isn’t clear right now, but given the church’s attempt to reverse the Tokyo District Court ruling through appeal he will likely try and act on that hope.