FOREF (Forum for Religious Freedom Europe) organized on October 4 an Info Evening on the Japanese witch hunt following the Abe assassination. Here are the videos.
by Alessandro Amicarelli
On July 8, 2022, former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe (1954–2022) was assassinated in Nara, Japan. The assassin, Tetsuya Yamagami, claimed he wanted to punish him for his cooperation with organizations connected with the Unification Church (now called the Family Federation for World Peace and Unification). Yamagami said he hated the Unification Church because his mother, a member, went bankrupt in 2002, allegedly because of excessive donations to the religious movement. He confessed he had also planned to assassinate Dr. Hak Ja Han Moon, the leader of the Family Federation.
Anti-cultists and the media managed to persuade the Japanese public opinion, and the government itself, that the Unification Church was responsible for the crime. An unprecedented campaign against “cults” followed, with the enactment of new anti-cult laws and regulations and a governmental lawsuit seeking the dissolution of the Family Federation as a religious corporation.
FOREF, the Forum for Religious Freedom Europe, organized on October 4 in its center in Vienna an Info Evening on the theme “Japan: The Ongoing Fight for Religious Freedom.” Guests in a fully packed conference room included representatives of most religions present in the Austrian capital, journalists, human rights activists, and scholars, some of them from other parts of Austria and nearby countries.
Peter Zoehrer, a well-known Austrian journalist, and the Executive Director of FOREF introduced the event and presented the activities of FOREF in Europe and Africa, where a new sister organization has recently been established. He then presented the two speakers, Massimo Introvigne, an Italian sociologist and the Managing Director of CESNUR, the Center for Studies on New Religions, who also serves as editor-in-chief of “Bitter Winter,” and Rosita Šorytė, a former Lithuanian diplomat and a member of the scientific committee of the European Federation for Freedom of Belief (FOB).
Peter Zoehrer’s introduction and Massimo Introvigne’s presentation.
Introvigne offered what some in the audience in the Q&A period that followed the presentations hailed as the best summary of Japan’s religious liberty crisis offered so far. He denounced the twisted argument according to which, if Yamagami’s mother had not become a member of, and donated significantly to the Church, the assassin would not have had a grudge against the religious group and its supporters, including Abe, and would not have killed the former Prime Minister. Obviously, the argument does not make sense, Introvigne said. He compared it to the defense often used by lawyers representing rapists that, if the girl had not showed herself as beautiful and sexy, she would not have been raped.
Acting against the Unification Church and seeking its legal dissolution, as the Japanese government is doing, also means that in Japan crime pays, Introvigne added. Through the government Yamagami is now achieving precisely what he wanted, i.e., destroying the Unification Church.
Šorytė offered a broader perspective on the international anti-cult movement. She noted that aggressive opposition to groups stigmatized as “cults” has (re-)emerged in recent years as a significant social force in countries as diverse as Russia and Japan. Her presentation examined six national situations—United States, China, Russia, France, Japan, and Argentina—and the different interests inspiring the local anti-cult campaigns.
In her second part, Šorytė argued that, while remaining different, anti-cult campaigns also have common elements and are supported by the lobbying efforts of diverse social actors such as the umbrella anti-cult federation FECRIS, the research consortium Invictus, the international diplomatic action of France, Russia, and China, Communist parties, international TV networks that have allied themselves with the anti-cult movements (primarily Netflix), anti-trafficking agencies interested in expanding their activity to “cults,” and private individual and corporate donors. While there is not a single “hidden hand” coordinating the anti-cult activities throughout the world, the role of these coordinating agencies should not be under-estimated and is largely behind what is happening in Japan, Šorytė concluded.
The full video of Šorytė’s lecture.
The success of the initiative, and of a plenary session on October 5 on the same subject with Zoehrer, Introvigne, and Šorytė at the 2024 Central European Symposium for the Academic Study of Religion (CESAR) at Vienna’s Central European University familiarized scholars, reporters, activists, and religionists from several countries with the seriousness of the religious liberty crisis in Japan and its background. More advocacy may (and perhaps should) follow.
Alessandro Amicarelli is a member and director of Obaseki Solicitors Law Firm in London. He is a solicitor of the Senior Courts of England and Wales, and a barrister of Italy, specializing in International and Human Rights Law and Immigration and Refugee Law. He has lectured extensively on human rights, and taught courses inter alia at Carlo Bo University in Urbino, Italy, and Soochow University in Taipei, Taiwan (ROC). He is the current chairman and spokesperson of the European Federation for Freedom of Belief (FOB).
