Unification Church Dissolution in Japan: An In-Depth Analysis of a Wrong Decision. 2. Civil Torts and “Public Welfare”

Reversing decades of case law, the decision stated that, in absence of criminal convictions, civil cases and deviation from social norms are enough to dissolve.

By Massimo Introvigne

April 4, 2025

Article 2 of 5. Read article 1.

Then Prime Minister Fumio Kishida, who changed the interpretation of the Religious Corporation Act overnight, during a state visit to the United Kingdom. Credits.

Continuing our examination of the decision of the Tokyo District Court pronouncing the dissolution of the Unification Church, I will now examine the second, third, and fourth question the judges answered.

The second question was whether, in absence of criminal verdicts, civil decisions are enough to pronounce the dissolution of a religious corporation. 

The court is aware that Japanese case law has consistently answered this question in the negative. Even subsequent Japanese governments maintained this interpretation. In 1994 and 1998, they rejected the anti-cult Network’s pressures to file for dissolution of the Church. In 2012, the government was sued by the Network for its unwillingness to start a dissolution case and won. After the Abe assassination, at first Prime Minister Kishida maintained that it was impossible to file a dissolution case since the Church had no criminal verdicts against it.

However, within twenty-four hours, under the pressure of the Network and the media instigated by the anti-cult lawyers, Kishida changed his mind and announced that he believed that civil verdicts were enough to file for dissolution.

The Tokyo District Court relies on a decision by the Supreme Court of March 3, 2025, concerning a non-penal fine imposed on the Church, which was accused of not having answered in full questions sent to it by the MEXT. In that decision, clearly with the aim to influence the then imminent Tokyo District Court’s verdict on the dissolution, the Supreme Court stated that civil torts are enough to dissolve a religious corporation. 

The Tokyo District Court, thus, did not have to elaborate on the question, but simply quoted the recent Supreme Court decision to state that although the Church insisted that only criminal verdicts should be considered “violations of laws and regulations” mentioned in the Religious Corporation Law, “this is not necessarily the case.” 

More precisely, whereas previous case law interpreted “violation of laws and regulations” as a breach of substantive legal provisions such as the Penal Code, the Tokyo District Court decision interprets it more broadly to include violations of norms, including those not codified in substantive law.

Neither the Supreme Court nor the Tokyo District Court explained why a decade-long case law should be reversed. The impression is that this counter-intuitive interpretation of the Religious Corporation Act was crafted ad hominem to hit the Church. This was done, however, without considering the potential implications for hundreds of other religious organizations, which have never been found guilty of any crime but might easily have been involved in civil litigations. As one of the leading Buddhist monks in Japan stated in an interview, this argument for the dissolution puts all religions and temples at risk.

The third question the Tokyo District Cout answered was whether damaging “public welfare” and infringing “social norms” are criteria to be considered in pronouncing the dissolution of a religious organizations. 

Its answer is “yes.” It is an answer supported by Japanese law, although the court perhaps goes one step beyond it when it boldly asserts that it regards as grounds for dissolution “deviations from what is considered socially appropriate” or acts that “deviate from what is considered reasonable in society.”

Japan’s own Constitution includes an article 13 stating that “freedom and rights” are protected only if they are “used for public welfare.” Article 81 of the Religious Corporation Acts includes acts harming “public welfare” among grounds for dissolution. The Tokyo District Court was also able to mention case law according to which behavior “outside the range of what is considered reasonable in social norms” is a ground for dissolution.

A view of the Tokyo District Court. Credits.

The problem is that in 1978 Japan signed the United Nations International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR). The Covenant includes a list of possible grounds for limiting freedom of religion or belief. This list is definitive rather than indicative. Public welfare is not included. As noted by attorney Patricia Duval, the United Nations Human Rights Committee repeatedly asked Japan to eliminate the “public welfare” restrictions. Japan never complied, which means that religious organizations can be eradicated based on the vague notion of “public welfare,” which the government interpreted in the Unification Church case as including “social norms,” i.e., the opinions of the majority.

That this is prohibited by international law was clearly spelled out by the United Nations Human Rights Committee in its General Comment no. 22 of 2013 to Article 18 of the ICCPR, protecting freedom of religion or belief: “Article 18 is not limited in its application to traditional religions or to religions and beliefs with institutional characteristics or practices analogous to those of traditional religions. The Committee therefore views with concern any tendency to discriminate against any religion or belief for any reason, including the fact that they are newly established, or represent religious minorities that may be the subject of hostility on the part of a predominant religious community.”

International human rights law should prevail over national law. This was acknowledged less than two weeks before the Tokyo District Court decision by the Court of Appeal of Borgarting, in Norway, where the Jehovah’s Witnesses had been de-registered by a first-degree verdict strongly influenced by anti-cult campaigns. On March 14, 2025, the Court of Appeal restored the registration, noting that the provisions of Norway’s Norwegian Religious Communities Act should be interpreted according to the United Nations and European conventions the country signed and ratified. When provisions in the Norwegian law are more restrictive than the international law, the latter should prevail.

By following the same rationale, Japanese courts should rule that the “public welfare” and “social norms” standards are incompatible with international law and thus not applicable. Unfortunately, Japan’s resistance to the United Nations warnings to respect the ICCPR appears to be followed by local courts.

The fourth question the Tokyo District Court answered is whether the number of civil cases lost by the Church is enough to support a dissolution verdict. It reports thirty-two cases and declares this figure highly significant. 

This conclusion is objectionable. As mentioned earlier, the Church had been incorporated in Japan in 1964 and 32 cases since then means one case on average every two years. Second, contradictorily, the court states that the fact that in the same period there were “many [civil] cases” that the Unification Church won is not particularly significant and does not deny the “typical trend” of courts ruling against the Church. The exact number of cases the Church won is not mentioned in the decision, but we are told that the number of plaintiffs was 169 in the cases the Church lost and 80 in those the Church won with “claims dismissed in their entirety” (there were other cases in which claims were partially dismissed). 

So, the Church won “in their entirety” cases against almost half of the plaintiffs, which does not seem irrelevant in a country where courts have a well-known bias against groups stigmatized as “cults.” Investigative journalist Masumi Fukuda reported a statement by Yoshihiro Ito, a lawyer who was a member of the anti-cult Network, that in Japan “In civil lawsuits, there is a kind of unwritten rule, that ‘If you are a cult, you lose,’” and “Claims that would not be accepted in other cases would be easily accepted if the opponent is a religion labeled a ‘cult.’” This bias notwithstanding, the Church won a good deal of cases.

The Tokyo District Court tries to answer this objection by stating that in the cases the Church lost, plaintiffs were mostly former members, while in the cases it won, they were mostly (67 out of 80) relatives of members. However, the facts courts were called to assess were the same.

Former victim of deprogramming Toru Goto. From X.

Additionally, there is one word that is not found anywhere in the court’s decision, “deprogramming,” or, as it is called in Japan, “forced conversion” (it should rather be “de-conversion”). This is a practice where adult believers are kidnapped by or on behalf of their parents, confined, and submitted to psychological and other pressures by professional “deprogrammers” in order to renounce their faith. Deprogramming has been outlawed as a criminal activity by American and European courts since the 20th century. Japan’s Supreme Court also declared it an illegal activity in 2015, confirming a High Court 2014 decision, in a case involving Toru Goto, a Unification Church believer who was kept confined for more than twelve years while several unsuccessful attempts to deprogram him succeeded each other. 

Prior to that decision, deprogrammed ex-members of the Church were routinely asked to sue it for damages to prove that they had really abandoned the faith, with the threat of being confined again if they didn’t. The statements by those deprogrammed ex-believers should be subject to caution. It appears that 121 out of the 169 plaintiffs in the 32 cases the Church lost, a substantial percentage, had been deprogrammed. This essential feature of the civil cases was ignored by the court.

Source: bitterwinter.org