Unification Church Dissolution in Japan: An In-Depth Analysis of a Wrong Decision. 4. The 2009 Compliance Declaration
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A crucial question is whether the incidents the court objected to diminished almost to zero after 2009. The court’s figures themselves confirm that this was the case.
April 8, 2025
The eight question the Tokyo District Court answered is when exactly the Church committed the civil torts. Indeed, this is a crucial part of the case and occupies several dozen pages in the verdict. The court was aware that, if it were true that, as the Church argued, the unlawful solicitation of donations had ceased in 2009, with very limited exceptions, it would be unreasonable to dissolve it in 2025 based on practices that had been successfully eradicated by the religious organization itself.
The decision tells the story of how, while it had taken measures to curb the objectionable activities of the company Happy World (discussed in the first article of this series) since 1987, the Church became acutely aware that “spiritual sales” and pressures to donate exposed its members to the risk of both criminals and civil actions in the first decade of the 20th century. Although the verdict maintains that the four criminal cases Church members lost (also discussed in my first article) were the “immediate” cause of the Church’s taking action, it is also true that in 2008 the Act on Specific Commercial Transactions, enacted for the protection of consumers, was amended and became substantially stricter.
As a result, the decision explains, in 2009 the Church issued a “Compliance Declaration,” which the verdict discusses not as a single document but as a plurality of “official instructions” sent to members in 2009, followed by interpretive texts in subsequent years. The latest instructions, confirming that these directives were in full force, were sent to members in 2022 in the wake of the Abe assassination and the controversies that followed.
The court acknowledges that these directives were comprehensive and adequate. They included lengthy instructions about “not encouraging or soliciting donations by specifically linking them to the karmic relationships of ancestors, and taking care not to obtain donations that are excessive in relation to the economic circumstances of the followers.”
They also stated that “donations should be received from those who had [adequately] studied the Unification Principle” and that “the recipient of the donation should be clearly stated as the Unification Church.” There were also provisions against soliciting donations from devotees with mental problems or who appeared senile. “With respect to donations from the elderly,” members were asked to “take into consideration the persons’ ability to make decisions, their faith, their ability to live, their family situation, etc., and be careful not to cause problems due to unreasonable donations.”
This should have closed the case. The Church, according to the decision, solicited donations before 2009 through means that civil decisions (although often ignoring international law) deemed illegal but put its house in order in that year. Since it is illogical to dissolve a religious corporation for sins it committed more than fifteen years ago and has learned not to commit again, the logical conclusion is that the Church should not be dissolved.
However, the court further asks whether the Compliance Declaration was effective. We can agree that it is not enough to issue a declaration. It is also necessary to prove that the organization caused its members to comply with it.
The court thus examines the only objective data that may offer an answer to whether the 2009 Compliance Declaration was effective: the number of incidents for which a civil court verdict was issued, or a settlement was reached. It is important to note that what is relevant is not when a verdict was rendered or a settlement was signed, but when the donations were made. Cases decided or settled after the Compliance Declaration but referring to donations made before it do not prove that it was not enforced or respected.
There are disputes on the mathematics of the court, but for the sake of the argument I will follow the figures the judges rely on. Concerning the 32 civil court verdicts, the court states that “three plaintiffs in two cases” out of 32 referred to donations made after the Compliance Declaration, although no payments made after 2014, i.e., eleven years ago, were ever mentioned.
“A similar downward trend,” the court writes, “is also seen in the number of settlements based on the filing of lawsuits.” As mentioned earlier, the number of these settlements is 448. According to the court, 440 refer to donations made before the Compliance Declaration. Just 8 refer to donations made after that Declaration.
While data about court cases and in-court settlements would indicate that the Compliance Declaration was effective, the court tells us that “a different trend” emerges from out-of-court settlements. “Out of 179 people who reported that they were victims (who made donations, etc.) [during or after 2010], the number of people who reported that they were victims during 2010 was 134, which is a considerable number. Although there were a certain number of victims reporting for a while after that, the number has continued to decline, and since 2019, it has been in the single digits (7 people in 2019 and 2020, 2021 and 2022 were 3 each).”
I don’t know of any religious organization where directives asking members to change their behavior are effective overnight. There is a technical time needed to persuade all members to comply. After the Compliance Declaration of 2009, it is not surprising that there were some incidents in 2010. However, they dramatically declined in subsequent years, reaching three each year in 2020, 2021, and 2022. Concerning the incidents in 2010, it should also be distinguished between complaints filed in 2010 with respect to older, pre-Compliance-Declaration donations and complaints of that year referring to donations made in late 2009 or 2010.
The court also volunteers that the number of “notices” sent by lawyers to the Church about donations unfairly solicited “has also been consistently decreasing since 2009, when it was 156, as it was 6 in 2021.” Not surprisingly, the number grew after the Abe assassination. According to the court, “it is stated that 31 notices were sent in 2022, but in the records of this case, only 13 notices from that year can be confirmed… and the period in which the other 18 notices were reported to be sent is not clear from the records. In addition, for the notices sent in 2023 regarding collective negotiations with a total of 124 former believers, the period in which they are recorded as having suffered damage is not clear.” Presumably, the media campaigns after the Abe assassination persuaded a certain number of former members to send notices about donations made decades before.
For what they are worth, also the statements submitted by MEXT largely refer to pre-Compliance-Declaration incidents. Out of 500 “victims,” only 19 reported post-Declaration donations.
The conclusion is unavoidable even for the Tokyo District Court. The judges admit that “the number of actual damage claims continued to decline after the declaration, and it can be said that the number of damage claims in recent years has decreased considerably.” In fact, before the Abe assassination it had almost disappeared.
Once again, the case should have been closed here, by concluding that “spiritual sales” and unfairly solicited donations were a problem of the past that had gradually and successfully been eradicated by the Church.
However, the court refused to come to the logical conclusions of its own analysis.
Contradictorily and unbelievably, it maintained that although the Compliance Declaration had caused “the number of damage claims to decrease considerably,” almost to zero, it can still be argued that the Declaration has not been effective.
Since the court’s own statistics refuse to cooperate, the judges tell us that “it is not appropriate to focus solely on the numerical aspects.” The decrease in numbers, however spectacular, according to the court, “does not immediately mean that the problematic situation of this case has been alleviated” and that the measures taken by the Church to avoid pressures on donors, thus escaping dissolution, have been “fundamental.”
How the court arrived at this surprising conclusion will be discussed in the next article of this series.
Source: bitterwinter.org
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