Japan: Coercion in Psychiatry and Faith-Breaking

The dark side of psychiatry: The hidden human rights abuses and coercion in Japan’s psychiatric system compared to coercive deprogramming of members of new religious movements

Tokyo, 25th August 2025 – Published as an article in the Japanese newspaper Sekai Nippo. Republished with permission. Translated from Japanese. Original article.

Justifying Human Rights Violations in Psychiatric Care

Lecture by Tomoyasu Yoneda, National Representative of the Citizens Commission on Human Rights Japan, at the SeNichi Club

by the editorial department of Sekai Nippo

The SeNichi Club, an association of Sekai Nippo readers, held its regular lecture online on the 23rd. Tomoyasu Yoneda (米田倫康), National Representative of the Citizens Commission on Human Rights (Japan chapter), gave a talk titled “The Archipelago of Asylums: The Dark Side of Psychiatry Without Human Rights.”

Yoneda stressed the reality of psychiatric care in Japan:

“Patients can be forcibly hospitalized on the basis of mere suspicion. There are 180,000 such cases annually, about 500 per day. This is a figure that shocks the international community.”

He pointed out that modern psychology and psychiatry, grounded in materialism, are based on the assumption that “mental illness stems from problems in the brain or genes.” As an efficient means of isolating the genes of the mentally ill from society, psychiatric wards have proliferated. Yoneda warned,

“In the first place, psychiatric diagnoses largely depend on the subjective judgment of doctors. Despite lacking clear evidence, they hold excessive power that enables them to justify human rights violations.”

Yoneda further argued that psychiatrists in Japan have historically instilled the belief that “mental patients are dangerous, and that forced hospitalization is the only option.” He cited cases where healthy individuals were forcibly admitted to psychiatric wards due to abuse of the system. Yoneda asserted,

“The issue is not merely to condemn discriminatory values of the past, but that laws and systems based on those values are still in place today. Psychiatry must be brought back under the rule of law.”

He also touched on the connection with the issue of coercive faith-breaking [See editor’s note below] targeting members of the Family Federation for World Peace and Unification (formerly the Unification Church). He suggested that the process of labeling new religious believers as “brainwashed”, disregarding their personal will, and restraining them bears similarities to the process of forcibly hospitalizing psychiatric patients.

Featured image above: Tomoyasu Yoneda (米田倫康) delivering his lecture at the SeNichi Club. Photo: Takahide Ishii (石井孝秀)

[Editor’s note: Coercive faith-breaking (“deprogramming”) in Japan refers to the practice of coercively attempting to separate individuals from their religious affiliations or beliefs, typically through intervention by family members, professional faith-breakers (deprogrammers) or organizations hostile to new religious movements (NRMs). This phenomenon often targets members of such movements, e.g. relatively large faiths like the Family Federation or Jehovah’s Witnesses, but also smaller groups like Happy Science (Kōfuku no Kagaku) and other newer religious movements.

However, also Soka Gakkai, a Buddhist-based lay organization with more than 8 million Japanese members, and affiliated with Nichiren Buddhism, has occasionally been subject to faith-breaking attempts.

The practice gained attention in the latter half of the 20th century, particularly in the 1980s and 1990s. Parents or concerned family members often hired faith-breakers who taught them how to abduct and forcibly detain believers. Almost all such cases involved confining the individual believer and cutting him or her off from the religious community. During the confinement, the believer was subjected to intense questioning or indoctrination designed to break his or her faith. The aim was to “rescue” the person from what the family often had been tricked by faith-breakers or lawyers to regard as harmful influence from the religious organization.

Critics of forced de-conversion argue that it violates fundamental human rights, including freedom of thought, religion, and association. Reports of psychological trauma and accusations of unlawful detention have sparked debates over its ethical and legal implications. In response, some religious groups, particularly NRMs, have lobbied for greater protections against such practices.

Japanese courts have been inconsistent in addressing cases of coercive faith-breaking. While some verdicts have condemned the practice as illegal detention, others have been more lenient, citing family concerns about “mental health” or alleged “exploitation” as mitigating factors.]

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