Inflated damage estimates misled politicians and judges. In September, however, a Tokyo judge absolved a Family Federation attorney prosecuted for criminal insult.
by Eitaro Ogawa
Article 2 of 3. Read article 1.
In the first article of this series, I noted that the liquidation of the Family Federation for World Peace and Unification, formerly known as the Unification Church, whose dissolution as a religious corporation was ordered by the Tokyo District Court in 2025 and confirmed by the Tokyo High Court in 2026, has so far attracted only 281 claimants, later grown to 337, and that these include creditors of every kind. The figure is very far from the ¥1 trillion in “potential” damage claimed by journalist Eight Suzuki on television, and from the “enormous” number of victims announced by the anti-cult lawyers. Who persuaded Japan otherwise?
Consider the following post on X by attorney Masaki Kito, dated November 2, 2023: “Susumu Murakoshi, head of the nationwide legal team representing victims of the Unification Church, deputy head Masaki Kito, and others attended a joint project team meeting of the Liberal Democratic Party and Komeito at the National Diet on November 2. They said potential losses were estimated at about ¥120 billion. Arguing that ‘the existing Civil Provisional Remedies Act and other legislation are wholly inadequate to address the situation,’ they called for new legislation to preserve assets.”
The Liberal Democratic Party and Komeito were then the two partners of the governing coalition. The legal team mentioned in the post is distinct from the National Network of Lawyers Against Spiritual Sales, the anti-cult lawyers’ association that has fought the Family Federation since the 1980s, although some lawyers belong to both. “Preserving assets” meant legal measures preventing the Family Federation from transferring or dispersing its properties before compensation claims could be settled.
Losses of ¥120 billion would be an almost unprecedented sum in Japan. If the figure were true, then “the existing Civil Provisional Remedies Act and other legislation” would surely be inadequate.
Here was a prominent attorney such as Kito taking the lead in formally presenting allegations of losses on this enormous scale and doing so at a meeting of the ruling parties’ own project team, no less. The lawmakers who heard him presumably assumed that the figure rested on some credible evidence. It is hardly surprising that the wider public understood it in the same way.
Now that the number of claimants stands at just a few hundred, must we not conclude that Kito and his associates’ assertions were pure speculation? Far from exposing real damage, they spread false information capable of inflicting losses of several hundred billion yen on the organization and its hundreds of thousands of members.
Japanese society as a whole was “brainwashed” by their falsehoods. Television wholeheartedly joined Kito’s and Suzuki’s attacks on the Family Federation. The resulting frenzy swept up the Kishida administration, the Liberal Democratic Party, the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology, the Tokyo District Court, the Tokyo High Court, and ultimately even the Supreme Court, inflicting immense harm on the organization and its members. Isn’t this what actually happened?
How alarming that the highest authorities of the executive, legislative, and judicial branches fell one after another before a tide of damaging allegations stirred up by so few people, with so little to check its advance.
And how feeble the voices challenging them have been. Apart from “Monthly Hanada,” only a handful of media outlets keep addressing the issue and exposing what has happened.
Can we accept that public debate, the very means by which a free society defends itself, proves so powerless before the pressure to conform?
Now, however, the tide is unmistakably beginning to turn.
On September 16, Tatsuki Nakayama, an attorney representing the Family Federation, was acquitted of the criminal charge of insulting Eight Suzuki. In Japanese law, insult (“bujoku”) is a criminal offense, legally distinct from defamation. The prosecutors declined to appeal, and the acquittal became final.
As I will discuss in the next article, court cases involving the Family Federation have until now ended almost invariably in defeat for its side. Judging from the summary of the judgment, Nakayama’s acquittal rested on careful and rational reasoning. To me, it was a step toward a judiciary finally emerging from an atmosphere of indoctrination in which the Family Federation is presumed to be a cult harmful to society, and beginning to recover its reason.
Suzuki filed his criminal complaint claiming that the language Nakayama had used about him in a blog post was an insult. Let me therefore introduce Nakayama’s August 15, 2023, blog post, titled “Journalists Who Use Pen Names Should Not Exist.”
“Eight Suzuki, the controversial ‘journalist’ who writes under a pen name,” Nakayama wrote, “publicly dismissed Toru Goto, a victim of twelve and a half years of abduction and confinement, as a ‘recluse.’ Asked what he meant, he responded with a string of insults: ‘Who cares,’ ‘playing the victim,’ and ‘advertising his victimhood.’ Twitter users have condemned him as utterly inhumane. How does someone develop a personality like Suzuki’s? To state my conclusion, the fact that ‘Eight Suzuki’ is a pen name appears to be one reason, indeed the principal reason.”
Toru Goto, a Unification Church member, was abducted and confined by his family for twelve and a half years in an attempt to force him to renounce his faith, in a case involving lawyers from the National Network of Lawyers Against Spiritual Sales. Japanese courts later recognized the confinement and awarded him damages. Suzuki called him a “hikikomori,” the Japanese word for a person living in extreme social withdrawal. To describe abduction and confinement as being a recluse is like calling a murder a suicide. To accuse Goto of “advertising his victimhood” is more outrageous still.
How can Suzuki indulge in such insults and mockery without a qualm?
Nakayama attributes it to the fact that “using a pen name can create a separate personality, detached from one’s actual character.” “Eight Suzuki” is a pen name, and his real name is Seishi Tanaka.
In essence, Nakayama argues that Tanaka, while calling himself a journalist, a profession that demands rigorous adherence to the facts, became increasingly insensitive to his own use of insults, ridicule, and exaggeration as he went on writing as “Eight Suzuki.”
Then comes the passage over which Suzuki filed his complaint: “For more than ten years, ‘Eight Suzuki’ kept churning out pieces for an online newspaper devoted to mockery, writing for maniacs and ‘otaku’ as though masturbating alone, and finding his solitary gratification. A personality built on mockery. A jeering little brat.” The online newspaper is apparently the satirical website “Yaya Nikkan Karuto Shimbun” (“Almost Daily Cult News”), to which Suzuki long contributed.
“A jeering little brat” made me laugh despite myself. Nakayama certainly used sexually explicit language, however, and similar expressions recur several times in the rest of the post.
It would be fair to say that Nakayama, exasperated by “Eight Suzuki,” overstepped the mark.
Judge Nobuhiro Takamori of the Tokyo District Court also acknowledged that such expressions, taken in themselves, met the requirements of the criminal offense of insult.
Reading the post in its entirety, however, Judge Takamori recognized Nakayama’s underlying argument that “the use of a pen name leads to self-indulgence and unethical statements.” He acquitted Nakayama, finding that the post “can be understood as having a context in which a personal attack [on Suzuki] was not the primary purpose.”
On a matter of principle, I should add that writers, commentators, and media organizations who take every objectionable expression to court are committing suicide as participants in public debate.
The “Asahi Shimbun” itself sued me for ¥50 million over my 2017 book “The Moritomo–Kake Affair: The Asahi Shimbun’s Biggest Journalistic Crime in Postwar Japan,” published by Asuka Shinsha. A powerful newspaper with ten thousand times my influence, instead of debating a lone writer like me in the public arena, dragged me into a costly lawsuit. Where are we, in Imperial Russia, in North Korea, or under the Xi Jinping regime?
Disputes about words must be fought with words. Unless we return to that fundamental boundary, the principles of a free society will crumble at their foundations.
Let me be unequivocal. All criticism contains an element of reproach or disparagement directed at someone’s character. Is that not obvious? No public debate is divorced from character.
Criticizing someone may mean disputing whether their reasoning is correct, and at times it also means challenging the kind of person they are. In such cases, our language may well take on an insulting tone. Why? Because we regard that person with contempt as someone base and worthy of scorn. What else would one expect?
Those who make their living through public debate must stop expecting to be coddled. If you cannot rise above an insult and answer it, and must rely on the courts, withdraw from the debate.
Without both the freedom to offend and the freedom to be offended, neither the freedom to defend ourselves nor the freedom to act with dignity can endure.
Human speech includes baseness of character and aggressive language, along with beauty of expression, nobility, and humanity. Freedom of expression can be preserved only by the principle that disputes across this entire spectrum are settled through public debate, without taking them to court.
I, too, have endured countless insults and torrents of abuse, and I have never even considered suing anybody. If I am to deal with someone’s insolence, I will do so with words or perhaps put myself on the line and physically beat them down.
However, the times may change; this remains the starting point of human dignity.
Eitaro Ogawa, born in 1967. Graduated from the Faculty of Letters at Osaka University and completed graduate studies at Saitama University. He is a well-known literary critic and the Chairman of the Japan Peace Studies Institute, and the recipient of the 18th Seiron New Wind Award. His major works include “The Promised Day: An Essay on Shinzo Abe” (Gentosha), “The Last Chance for Victory” (PHP Institute), “A Readable Showa History of War” (KK Bestsellers), “Twenty-One Chapters After Hideo Kobayashi” (Gentosha), “Chronicle of the Heisei Era” (Seirindo), and “The Value of a Writer” (by the publishers of the “Hanada” magazine).
