Defense lawyers and anti-Unification-Church media are abusing Yamagami’s mother, not the Family Federation.
by Massimo Introvigne
The trial of Tetsuya Yamagami, the assassin of former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, has become less a judicial proceeding than a stage for Japan’s media to continue their vicious crusade against the Family Federation for World Peace and Unification (FFWPU, formerly the Unification Church). The most recent hearing, featuring the testimony of Yamagami’s mother, revealed not only her dignity and resilience but also the shameless bias of reporters who twisted her words into ammunition against her faith.
Shielded behind a partition, Yamagami’s mother spoke with composure. She expressed sorrow for the crime her son committed: “I sincerely apologize for the terrible incident Tetsuya caused.” She also affirmed her continuing membership in the FFWPU. These two sentiments—grief for her son’s actions and fidelity to her faith—are not incompatible. They are the natural coexistence of a mother’s pain and a believer’s conviction.
She explained how she joined the church in 1991, after a young member visited her home and offered prayers for her sick son. In the months that followed, she donated large sums, totaling around 100 million yen over the years. She admitted she believed such donations might help her son, but she also clarified that the church never explicitly told her this. Her testimony was deeply human: a widow, devastated by her husband’s suicide, desperate to save her child, and clinging to faith as a source of meaning.
Yet the Japanese media reported her testimony with a poisonous slant. Kansai TV highlighted family emails, including her plea for funds to travel to Korea—“If I don’t go, I’ll die”—as if proof of fanaticism rather than the cry of a depressed woman under immense pressure. “Yomiuri Shimbun” described her donations as evidence of “religious background,” deliberately framing the tragedy as the fault of the FFWPU rather than the complex family circumstances: a father’s suicide, a son’s illness, and decades of hardship. Other media sang the same song.
The press ignored crucial facts. Yamagami’s mother received a 50% refund from the church. Her accused son’s brother died by suicide six years after that refund agreement. Abe’s assassination occurred two decades after her bankruptcy.
None of this fits the simplistic narrative of a “reaction to church exploitation.” Instead, the media prefer to erase timelines and causality, presenting every family misfortune as the direct consequence of religious affiliation.
The defense lawyers, too, sought to exploit her testimony, pressing her to admit that donations deprived her son of education. She answered honestly: at the time she believed donations may be more important than schooling. But this was not coercion by the church—it was her own anguished judgment, shaped by grief and desperation. To portray this as institutional abuse is to deny her agency and humanity.
As I argued in an earlier article for “Bitter Winter,” the detail all media forgot is that after the local believers’ group of the Unification Church had agreed to refund half of her donations, in 2009 all the family including Tetsuya signed a settlement and stated they were happy with it.
The real violence against this woman came not from her church but from the manipulations of lawyers and the relentless attacks of the media. They weaponized her testimony, stripping it of nuance, and turned a mother’s sorrow into anti-cult propaganda.
Yamagami’s mother remains resilient in her faith. She testified with dignity, acknowledging her sadness for her son’s crime while affirming her spiritual convictions. This is the portrait of a believer who has endured tragedy yet refuses to renounce her conscience.
The Japanese media, however, continue to distort her situation, using the trial as a platform to vilify the FFWPU. In doing so, they commit a violence of their own—against truth, against religious liberty, and against a grieving mother whose testimony deserves respect, not exploitation.
Massimo Introvigne (born June 14, 1955 in Rome) is an Italian sociologist of religions. He is the founder and managing director of the Center for Studies on New Religions (CESNUR), an international network of scholars who study new religious movements. Introvigne is the author of some 70 books and more than 100 articles in the field of sociology of religion. He was the main author of the Enciclopedia delle religioni in Italia (Encyclopedia of Religions in Italy). He is a member of the editorial board for the Interdisciplinary Journal of Research on Religion and of the executive board of University of California Press’ Nova Religio. From January 5 to December 31, 2011, he has served as the “Representative on combating racism, xenophobia and discrimination, with a special focus on discrimination against Christians and members of other religions” of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE). From 2012 to 2015 he served as chairperson of the Observatory of Religious Liberty, instituted by the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs in order to monitor problems of religious liberty on a worldwide scale.
