Japan’s government asks a court to revoke the legal religious status of the Unification Church

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TOKYO (AP) — Japan’s authorities requested a courtroom Friday to revoke the authorized standing of the Unification Church after an Training Ministry investigation concluded the group for many years has systematically manipulated its followers into donating cash, sowing worry and harming their households.

The request submitted to the Tokyo District Courtroom asks for it to concern a dissolution order revoking the church’s standing as a spiritual group. Training Ministry officers submitted 5,000 items of paperwork and proof in cardboard bins to the courtroom to assist its request.

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The method entails hearings and appeals from each side and would take some time. If the order is accredited and its authorized standing is stripped, the church might nonetheless function however would lose its tax exemption privilege as a spiritual group and would face monetary setbacks.

The request was made a day after Training Minister Masahito Moriyama introduced a panel of consultants had endorsed the revocation request primarily based on the findings of the ministry’s investigation into the church’s fundraising ways and different allegations.

The Japan department of the South Korea-based church, which formally calls itself the Household Federation for World Peace and Unification, earlier condemned the federal government’s determination.

“It’s our deepest remorse that the Japanese authorities made the intense determination primarily based on distorted data supplied by a leftist attorneys’ group fashioned for the aim of destroying our group,” the church mentioned in an announcement late Thursday. “It is going to be a stain in Japan’s Constitutional historical past.”

As a part of the Training Ministry investigation, officers interviewed greater than 170 individuals allegedly harmed by the church’s fundraising ways and different issues. The church failed to answer dozens of questions through the seven inquiries, Moriyama mentioned Thursday.

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The church tried to steer its followers’ decision-making, utilizing manipulative ways, making them purchase costly items and donate past their monetary means and inflicting worry and hurt to them and their households, Moriyama mentioned Thursday.

The ways significantly deviated from the legislation on non secular teams, by which the aim of the church buildings’ authorized standing is to present individuals peace of thoughts, he mentioned. “The actions are wrongful conducts underneath the Civil Code and their damages are immense.”

The Company for Cultural Affairs discovered 32 circumstances of civil lawsuits acknowledging damages totaling 2.2 billion yen ($14.7 million) for 169 individuals, whereas the quantity of settlements reached in or outdoors courtroom totaled 20.4 billion yen ($137 million) and concerned 1,550 individuals, Moriyama mentioned.

Japan has in place hurdles for restraining non secular actions attributable to classes from the prewar and wartime oppression of freedom of faith and thought.

The investigation adopted months of public outrage and questions concerning the group’s fundraising and recruitment ways after former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s assassination final 12 months. The person accused of capturing Abe allegedly was motivated by the previous prime minister’s hyperlinks to the church that he blamed for bankrupting his household.

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A long time of cozy ties between the church and Japan’s governing Liberal Democratic Celebration have been revealed since Abe’s assassination and have eroded assist for Prime Minister Fumio Kishida’s authorities. Kishida advised reporters Thursday that the federal government’s determination to hunt the revocation order was made fastidiously primarily based on details and was not political, denying hypothesis it was meant to shore up dwindling public assist.

The Unification Church obtained authorized standing as a spiritual group in Japan in 1968 amid an anti-communist motion supported by Abe’s grandfather, former Prime Minister Nobusuke Kishi.

The church has acknowledged extreme donations however says the issue has been mitigated for greater than a decade. It additionally has pledged additional reforms.

Specialists say Japanese followers are requested to pay for sins dedicated by their ancestors throughout Japan’s 1910-1945 colonial rule of the Korean Peninsula, and that almost all of the church’s worldwide funding comes from Japan.

If the church’s standing is revoked, it could be the primary underneath civil legislation. Two earlier circumstances concerned prison prices — the Aum Shinrikyo doomsday cult, which carried out a sarin nerve fuel assault on the Tokyo subway, and the Myokakuji group, whose executives have been convicted of fraud.

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