What crime did the religious organization commit? Apparently, collecting donations to support its charitable endeavors abroad.
by Patricia Duval (Bitter Winter)
Maybe for the first time in the history of democracies, Japan has now dissolved a Church legal entity because it funded humanitarian activities worldwide.
It is the exact rationale given by the Japanese Supreme Court on June 22, 2026, to reject the appeal against the dissolution order of the Tokyo High Court, and uphold that the entire religion of the former Unification Church (now known as the Family Federation for World Peace and Unification) gathering 250 Churches and hundreds of thousands of believers throughout Japan, should be deprived of legal entity and all its assets liquidated.
Without addressing the numerous arguments presented by the defense attorneys, the Supreme Court answered only in a few paragraphs to the argument of violation of the believers’ rights to freedom of religion or belief and freedom of association.
The Court dismissed the argument out of hand, giving the following reasoning: “A dissolution order has no legal effect other than causing the religious corporation to lose its juridical personality, and is not accompanied by any legal effect whatsoever prohibiting or restricting the religious activities of its adherents.”
Then admitting that the deprivation of all the places of worship still represented “some impediment to the religious activities carried out by the Family Federation for World Peace and Unification as a religious organization and by its adherents,” the Court found that such “impediment is no more than an indirect and de facto consequence accompanying the dissolution order.”
Same with their freedom of assembly: the fact that parishioners cannot gather anymore is also a de facto consequence of the dissolution.
So the “impediment” of confiscating all the Church’s assets acquired with parishioners’ donations and preventing members from gathering there anymore is just collateral damage caused by the dissolution—which was purportedly made necessary by the harmful behavior of the Church members raising donations for their nonprofit humanitarian activities.
The Court explained that “the appellant’s adherents continuously engaged, over the long period from 1973 to 2022, in acts of soliciting donations constituting tortious conduct,” deemed unacceptable under “social norms,” therefore causing significant harm to “public welfare.”
And the Court added: “Furthermore, those tortious acts were carried out under the organized involvement of the appellant. Specifically, based on the policy of the founder of the appellant’s doctrine and others that believers in Japan should provide economic assistance to countries throughout the world, even by making personal sacrifices, the appellant requested its adherents to solicit donations.”
As there was no criminal conduct by the Unification Church, the government relied on civil torts to obtain judicial dissolution.
As they could not find any crimes—and no prosecutions were ever initiated against Church representatives for extortion—they used civil tort cases filed by ex-members under constraint after being forcefully confined and “deprogrammed.”
And as there was no personal enrichment and no profit-making, they ruled that the Church wanted to squeeze the Japanese people dry to help people in other countries, in particular, Africa and other poor countries.
According to the information provided in the dissolution case file, the Unification Church and related associations are present in 194 countries worldwide for missionary activities. Donations from Japan have been used for missionary work in Asia, Africa, Europe, Latin America, and other countries globally.”
According to Japanese civil court case law, it is not “normal” to make large donations intended for the Unification Church. The courts concluded that the Japanese individuals must therefore have been “brainwashed” to have reached that point.
Forced abduction and confinement, followed by forcible “persuasion” by a traditional Protestant pastor, were intended to help them come to their senses. It is precisely this type of “deprogramming” that has been practiced for half a century on approximately 4,300 members of the Unification Church in Japan.
The dissolution of the Church is simply the culmination of this process and the conclusion of a setup.
Apparently, collecting donations to help people in other countries is considered a serious crime, and the Japanese must be particularly helpless and gullible for the State to have to protect them—against their will—from the risk of being mentally manipulated into making donations for humanitarian causes.
However, Japan should be delighted and proud to have an organization that is restoring its image on the international stage, given that it was previously viewed as a selfish and racist country due to its policy of completely excluding foreigners.
Today, Church volunteers in Africa and other countries facing hardship are grappling with the challenge of informing local communities that funding for their schools and women’s support centers has been cut off—a problem that the Japanese government clearly does not care about in the least.
Finally, the Court concluded that “there remains a risk that, in the future, it will continue to require its adherents to solicit donations,” therefore dissolution is “unavoidable.”
Thus, the Supreme Court affirmed, on the one hand, that parishioners could continue to practice their faith as an informal association of believers, but held, on the other hand, that there was a risk that the same situation could recur, since religious doctrine itself calls for helping one’s fellow human beings throughout the world.
This is, in fact, utter hypocrisy. From a logical standpoint, given the wording of the decision, any new association of believers based on the same religious doctrine could be subject to a new request for dissolution by the government.
This constitutes a clear violation of the members’ rights to freedom of religion or belief, as well as to freedom of assembly and association.