Attorneys Kamiya and Yamaguchi brought to court a manifesto for religious intolerance and discrimination.
by Massimo Introvigne
In the trial of Tetsuya Yamagami, the man who assassinated former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, the courtroom has become a stage for ideological theater. At the center of this performance are attorneys Shinichi Kamiya and Hiroshi Yamaguchi, prominent figures in the National Network of Lawyers Against Spiritual Sales. Their testimony, cloaked in legalese, is a thinly veiled continuation of a decades-long campaign to delegitimize the Unification Church (now called the Family Federation for World Faith and Unification) and stigmatize its members—and their children.
Kamiya and Yamaguchi’s courtroom statements were not neutral expert opinions. They were polemics, echoing the Network’s entrenched view that the Unification Church is not a religion but a “cult.” This framing is not just semantically loaded—it’s strategically deployed to strip believers of their rights and justify coercive interventions. Kamiya’s chilling remark—“The important question would have been how to get his [Yamagani’s] mother to leave the organization”—reduces a woman’s religious conviction to a pathology requiring extraction. Her agency is erased; she becomes a problem to be solved, not a person to be respected.
This rhetoric is not theoretical. Some lawyers in the Network have a documented history of involvement in deprogramming—i.e., in kidnapping and confining believers to compel them to renounce their faith. That Kamiya speaks of “getting her out” while representing a group with such a legacy is disturbing.
Kamiya’s definition of “religious abuse” is equally troubling: “It is forcing a child to follow the parent’s faith while ignoring the child’s thoughts and individuality.” This is a radical departure from international norms. Japan has signed and ratified the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), which states in Article 18 that ”The States Parties to the present Covenant undertake to have respect for the liberty of parents and, when applicable, legal guardians to ensure the religious and moral education of their children in conformity with their own convictions.” If Attorney Kamiya has difficulty understanding the text, “their own” refers to the parents’ convictions, not the children’s.
Across cultures, parents have the right to educate their children in their faith. Baptizing infants, taking toddlers to church without asking them whether their “thoughts and individuality” would not perhaps lean towards a different religion, or teaching religious values are not abuses—they are expressions of familial and cultural continuity. Kamiya’s framing pathologizes ordinary religious upbringing and opens the door to state intrusion into private belief.
Where is the boundary between “forcing” and “teaching”? Kamiya’s definition criminalizes the very fabric of religious life and is inconsistent with the ICCPR.
Attorney Hiroshi Yamaguchi also testified but conspicuously omitted the Network’s political origins. Founded in 1987, the group emerged from opposition to the Unification Church’s anti-Communist stance and its support for Japan’s anti-espionage legislation. Yamaguchi himself played a role in this founding moment, yet in court, he presented the Network as a purely humanitarian endeavor. This is historical revisionism.
His proposal for “organized action” with second-generation members of the Church is especially sinister. It echoes recent campaigns in Japanese schools where materials targeting children of minority religions had been disseminated. The United Nations has repeatedly condemned these efforts, warning that they risk violating the rights of religious minorities. “Rather than protecting children who belong to religion or belief minorities,” the UN stated, “these materials risk contributing to their bullying and marginalisation.”
The lawyers of the Network are not neutral advocates. They are ideologues using the Yamagami trial to advance a political and religious agenda. Their testimony is not about understanding the roots of violence—it’s about reinforcing a narrative that paints the Unification Church as evil and its members as victims or threats. This is not justice. It’s a campaign of religious eradication, aimed at the legal dissolution of the Family Federation and targeting even his children.
In doing so, they ignore international law, erase individual agency, and flirt with authoritarian tactics. The courtroom becomes a pulpit, and the trial a sermon promoting a faulty notion of ideological purity and fostering intolerance.
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.
