SEOUL, South Korea — A District Court in Tokyo ordered the Unification Church’s operations in Japan to be dissolved on Tuesday in a move likely to ignite a major appeals battle and trigger condemnation from religious freedom advocates around the world.
Leaders of the church, formally known as the Family Federation for World Peace and Unification (FFWPU), quickly condemned the order, which would revoke the church’s legal status, remove its tax-exempt privilege and require a liquidation of its assets in Japan.
“The Japanese government has shamefully abandoned the core principles of human rights and religious liberty enshrined in the United Nations conventions that Japan itself has signed and committed to uphold,” said Dr. Michael Balcomb, president of FFWPU Europe and Middle East.
“It now aligns itself with pariah states that routinely deny their citizens the fundamental right to freedom of belief,” he said in a statement, asserting that the Tokyo court ruling amounted to “an embarrassment for Japan and a troubling setback for religious freedom.”
Tuesday’s ruling marks the first time any religious body in Japan has been dissolved on civil charges. Unification Church lawyers insist prosecutors in the Tokyo court case filed falsified information.
The court order came after months of legal wrangling, following a 2023 request by Japan’s Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology to dissolve the influential South Korea-based Unification Church amid backlash sparked by the 2022 assassination of former Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe.
Mr. Abe’s killer was angered by the former prime minister’s links to the church, which he claimed had caused his mother’s bankruptcy because of monetary donations from her. The church’s defenders note that the killer’s mother, who is still a church member, and other family members signed a statement absolving the church of any responsibility and that she received half her donations back.
While an anti-Unification movement in Japan dates back decades, church supporters say the Abe developments and political acrimony that followed in Japan sparked emboldened fringe Japanese communists, who seized on the development to smear and discredit Mr. Abe’s long-ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) over its links to the church.
A Japanese government probe into the former prime minister’s assassination triggered public debate in Japan over the church’s history as an anti-communist force on the Japanese religious and civil society landscape.
The Unification Church was founded in 1954 by the Rev. Sun Myung Moon, a Cold Warrior and fierce proponent of religious freedom who had grown up beneath the oppression of communist North Korea.
The church initially became active in Japan in the late-1950s, helping to prevent the spread of communism.
Japan’s court ruling on Tuesday prompted frustration among freedom of religion advocates around the world, and triggered shock and sadness among followers of the church.
High-profile American political figures have argued publicly during the weeks and months leading up to the ruling that the Japanese government’s legal actions aimed at the church were paramount to a politically driven push to snuff out the basic rights of individuals to embrace faith without government intimidation.
Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich warned recently that Japan would deal a massive blow to the universal principle of religious freedom, could deeply damage its relationship with the U.S. and would hand a major win to communist China if it followed through with an effort to punish the Church.
In remarks last month to the International Religious Freedom Summit 2025 in Washington, D.C., Mr. Gingrich and other prominent political and spiritual figures went so far as to describe the Japanese government’s push to dissolve the church and seize its assets as a communist-backed attack.
“The Biden administration has already condemned this activity. The United Nations has already condemned this activity. And now, with President Trump, we have somebody who is deeply, passionately committed to religious liberty,” Mr. Gingrich said in a prerecorded video address to the summit.
“A government which can block you from approaching God can block you from anything,” the former House speaker said in a video message last month to the International Religious Freedom Summit 2025.
“To close down an organization as a deliberately political act of retribution is a profound undermining of the very basis of freedom,” Mr. Gingrich told the summit, widely regarded as a premier annual religious freedom gathering.
Former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said in remarks at the same summit last month that “the church, founded by Rev. Moon, has long stood against communism and has always championed stronger ties between Japan, Korea and the United States.”
“If there is anything the Unification Church undermines, it indeed is communism,” Mr. Pompeo said.
What began with a tiny church founded in South Korea in the 1950s has evolved over decades into a global spiritual movement and affiliated commercial empire comprising hundreds of ventures. In 1982, Rev. Moon founded The Washington Times. Rev. Moon’s wife, Dr. Hak Ja Han Moon, has headed the Unification movement since Rev. Moon died in 2012.
Japan’s parliament enacted a law in December 2022 restricting donation solicitations by religious and other groups to politicians. The law has triggered warnings from freedom-of-faith groups worldwide, including the International Religious Freedom Roundtable, which has representatives in dozens of countries.
The 2022 law prohibited religious groups from engaging in “spiritual sales” of items that carry religious significance and allows believers, other donors and their families to seek the return of money given to religious organizations.
Members of the South Korea-based Unification Church say the church has not engaged in spiritual sales for more than a decade. Some also believe the church is subject to anti-Korean prejudice in Japan.
Prominent religious freedom groups have also spoken out against the Japanese government’s targeting of the church. In a statement submitted to the United Nations Human Rights Committee in 2022, the Europe-based Coordination of Associations and Individuals for Freedom of Conscience accused the Japanese government of engaging in a “campaign of intolerance, discrimination, and persecution of the Unification Church.”
• Ben Wolfgang and Guy Taylor contributed to this report.
