When belief becomes a crime: Religious freedom is under attack in Japan

OPINION:

A peaceful religion is being erased by a democratic government.

Imagine your children come home from school with a colorful flyer.

It tells them how to turn you in—for taking them to church.

This isn’t fiction. It’s Japan, 2025.

For the first time in Japan’s postwar history, the state is dismantling a peaceful religion—without a single criminal conviction. Tell me why.

Our members in Japan are scared. They’re apologizing for something they didn’t do. They are worried that their families will be torn apart, and their beliefs used against them.

I’ve spoken with members who are hiding their faith and with parents teaching their children not how to pray but how to stay silent at school. This isn’t a distant policy issue—it’s personal.

On March 25, the Tokyo District Court ruled in favor of Japan’s Ministry of Education (MEXT) to dissolve the Family Federation for World Peace and Unification (FFWPU, also known as the Unification Church) Japan. No crimes. No violence. No law broken. Yet the court has ruled in favor of dissolution, jeopardizing the church’s legal status, assets, and very existence.

This wasn’t a trial. It was a political takedown.

This is lawfare—the use of legal machinery to eliminate a disfavored group. And if Japan can do it, so can anyone else.

The setup for this assault began in a moment of national mourning. In July 2022, former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe was assassinated. The killer wasn’t a member. His decades-old family grievance was sensationalized into a media frenzy. In the vacuum of grief and political opportunism, our church became the scapegoat.

And into that emotional chaos stepped a long-prepared movement. Within days, radical lawyers and anti-religious activists—many tied to the Japanese Communist Party—launched a coordinated campaign to demonize our church, packaged as public safety. Facts didn’t matter. Fear did.

On Oct. 17, 2022, Prime Minister Fumio Kishida publicly admitted FFWPU could not be dissolved because we had broken no laws. But the very next day, he reversed his statement and gave MEXT authority to dissolve a religion without a crime. Civil suits, no matter how old, were enough to justify dissolution.

In a single day, Japan quietly crossed a constitutional threshold—and left the door open for any government to do the same.

Let’s be clear: Our church has not been convicted of a single crime. We were denied cross-examination. The court relied on decades-old civil suits and unchallenged hearsay.

And when questions were raised about the integrity of the evidence, the silence was loud. On March 13, 2025, Sen. Satoshi Hamada publicly asked whether MEXT had submitted falsified witness testimony. The Ministry offered no denial. Attorney Shinichi Tokunaga called it “the crime of the century,” warning that “if Japan grants the order based on fabricated evidence, it will be a disgrace to the world.”

If this ruling stands, every FFWPU church property, school, and bank account of FFWPU Japan will be seized. Our legal identity will vanish. Public worship will be crushed under bureaucracy. Families will lose spiritual homes. Children will lose their sense of belonging.

Religious scholar Massimo Introvigne said plainly: “If this is not legalized theft, I don’t know what is.”

I’ve met young members who whisper their faith in public—not because they’re ashamed, but because they’ve been taught that silence is safety. An entire faith is being driven underground—not for what we did, but for what we believe.

And it’s already happening. Today, our members can’t even rent a meeting room under our name. Echoing what once happened to Jewish communities in the U.S., they’re being blacklisted—not for actions, but for affiliation.

This is happening in a respected democracy. If Japan can erase a religious group without a single conviction, it gives cover for others to do the same. And they are. Rwanda and Kenya have all taken steps to restrict minority religions—citing Japan’s example. Religious freedom in Japan is under attack. And it’s spreading.

The decision to dissolve FFWPU Japan isn’t about compliance or victims. It’s about eliminating a voice. This isn’t just religious discrimination. It’s democratic betrayal. It’s a vendetta against our church that started over 40 years ago.

The legal architects behind this assault have operated for decades under the banner of the National Network of Lawyers Against Spiritual Sales—a group whose explicit mission, since its founding in the 1980s, has been to dismantle our faith entirely. In 1987, one of their leaders, Hiroshi Yamaguchi, declared, “The aim of the lawyers’ association is to convince the Ministry of Education to revoke the religious corporation status of the Unification Church.”

In 2022, Japanese Communist Party Chairman Kazuo Shii proudly declared this campaign “the final war against the Unification Church.”

It seems that our true crime is our pro-God, anti-communist stance.

The world should pay attention. This is a coordinated political assault—driven by ideology, not justice—executed through a court ruling that ignored facts, dismissed warnings, and rewrote the rules of democracy.

I don’t believe all of the lawyers, politicians, or media who pushed this are evil. But I believe they all forgot something essential: That a democracy isn’t measured by how it treats the powerful—but by how it treats the powerless.

The U.S. State Department’s 2023 Religious Freedom Report called Japan’s use of civil claims to justify dissolution “a deviation from the norm” in democratic governance.

Former Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, Newt Gingrich, said, “This order to dissolve the Unification Church is a terrible assault on religious freedom and liberty in Japan. It is an unprecedented attack on a faith organization which has broken no laws and caused no harm.”

As president of FFWPU USA, I say to the world: This is not the time for silence. This is bigger than our church. Religious freedom is under attack—not only in Japan. This is about the future of religious liberty everywhere.

We challenge this ruling and ask those who value freedom to speak now, not because we practice the same faith but because we share the same freedom to believe.

If a government can outlaw belief without a crime, then no faith is safe—and no democracy is either.

When belief becomes a crime, the world has lost its soul.

• Dr. Demian Dunkley is the Chairman and President of Family Federation for World Peace and Unification (FFWPU) USA. Driven by a deep commitment to fostering global unity and peace, he brings over two decades of international leadership experience to his role.