Using Abe’s Assassination Against Unificationism

How the politics of reframing Abe’s assassination created a modern-day witch hunt leading to the dissolution of the Family Federation in Japan

Tokyo, 8^th July 2026 – Published as an article in the Japanese newspaper Sekai Nippo. Republished with permission. Translated from Japanese. Original article.

[Part 1 of interview with author Fumihiro Kato]

Losing Sight of the Real Issue by Shifting the Focus

Four Years Since the Assassination of Former Prime Minister Abe

by Yoichiro Miyata (宮田陽一郎)

See part 2 of the interview: Media Turning Public Opinion Against a Minority

The justification for ordering the dissolution of the Family Federation

8^th July marks four years since the assassination of former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe (安倍晋三). The shocking incident – in which a former prime minister who had led the longest-serving administration in Japan’s constitutional history was killed while delivering a campaign speech for the House of Councillors election – led to intense public criticism of the Family Federation for World Peace and Unification (formerly the Unification Church) after it became known that the defendant’s mother was one of its members. This ultimately culminated in the Supreme Court’s confirmation of a court order to dissolve the religious organization.

See also Dissolution Case: Attorney Reveals Inside Story

See also Volunteer Group Barred After Question Over Ties

See also When Giving Becomes Grounds for Dissolution

See also How Media Narrative Was Changed to Attack Faith

See also BBC, Bias, and the Weaponization of Language

Why did this lead to what the interview describes as an infringement of the constitutionally guaranteed freedom of religion? We spoke with writer Fumihiro Kato (加藤文宏).

Interviewer: Yoichiro Miyata (宮田陽一郎)

“How do you view the four years since Abe’s assassination?”

I think they have been four years during which we lost sight of the essence of the issue. The starting point – and ultimately the conclusion – of losing sight of the real issue was that the shooting was reframed as a problem concerning politics and religion.

As a result, Japanese society came to feel compelled to justify the dissolution order against the Family Federation and human rights violations committed against its members. These four years have been marked by the contradiction that people have become unable to criticize those developments.

Even regarding the issue of religion and politics, there has never been any evidence that the Liberal Democratic Party was forced by the religious organization to adopt particular policies or submit specific bills, nor any evidence that the public actually suffered harm as a result. Yet society as a whole was swept along nonetheless.

In the end, even the judiciary found itself embracing contradictions in order to legitimize the prevailing social atmosphere and political decisions, and those contradictions ultimately took the form of the dissolution order against the Family Federation.

In that sense, we continue to lose sight of the true nature of the issue that began with Abe’s assassination.

“On 21^st January, the Nara District Court sentenced Tetsuya Yamagami (山上徹也), who killed Abe, to life imprisonment. Although the defense appealed, do you think the case has now been resolved?”

I think it remains far from resolved because the judiciary, politics, and society as a whole have lost the ability to make fair judgments and assessments about the case. Even on appeal, the defense team will essentially have no choice but to make the same arguments they presented in the district court.

Immediately after Abe was assassinated, the discussion was shifted to the relationship between religion and politics. Then, using the keyword “donations”, it was shifted again into an issue of religion and consumer problems. The subject changed once, then again, becoming something entirely different.

More about “consumer problems”: Terms from Consumer Law Used to Rob Faith

Even if the appeal leads to a new trial in the High Court, the issue will simply continue to be reframed repeatedly, so we will never get any closer to the core of the matter. Nor will it become an opportunity for society to reflect on what happened.

The framing of the issue as one of religion and consumer problems is something that Yamagami himself rejects. It was not that he was unable to attend university; rather, he had become so disillusioned with society at the time that he simply did not want to go.

His mother reportedly told him, “I’ll find whatever money is necessary, so please go to university. It’s fine even if you have to spend another year preparing.” That is beyond doubt.

Therefore, I do not believe the defendant himself was a victim of religion. Instead, the defense team’s courtroom publicity campaign led society’s understanding in the wrong direction, and it has become very difficult to correct that perception.

“After Abe’s assassination, the media harshly criticized the Family Federation. What do you see as the problems with that coverage?”

The sensational reporting and entertainment-style scandal coverage directed at what was then the Unification Church during the 1980s and 1990s was simply repeated after Abe’s assassination. The essential nature of the reporting did not change.

From the 2000s until the incident in 2022, the Family Federation had largely faded from public attention as a religious organization, and people generally did not criticize its members. Public memories of those who had been the subject of controversy in the 1980s and 1990s had also faded.

After Abe’s assassination, the issue was reframed as one involving religion and consumer problems. However, because there were no such controversies in the 2020s, critics of the Family Federation had no new means of attacking it.

As a result, they had little choice but to recycle the gossip and scandals from the 1980s and 1990s.

There were, however, two important differences from that earlier period.

The first was that Abe’s public assassination was an extremely shocking event that had already created an atmosphere of widespread public shock.

The second was that the idea that ordinary people could easily become victims of severe consumer problems was presented as though it were a reality, by making use of Yamagami and other so-called “second-generation” members [See editor’s note below] of religious groups.

See part 2 of the interview: Media Turning Public Opinion Against a Minority

Profile: Fumihiro Kato

Fumihiro Kato (加藤文宏) was born in 1964 in Shizuoka Prefecture. In addition to publishing novels under the pen name Fumi Kato, he founded the magazine Monthly IJ, where he interviewed people from a wide range of backgrounds.

Following the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant accident, he focused on reputational damage and issues affecting voluntary evacuees, paying particular attention to what he describes as “information disasters” caused by media coverage.

He has contributed analytical articles and essays – primarily concerning media-related issues – to opinion journals and other publications.

His book Examining Runaway Media Coverage organizes and analyzes developments from the assassination of former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe (安倍晋三) through the government’s request for a dissolution order against the Family Federation for World Peace and Unification (formerly the Unification Church).

See also Dissolution Case: Attorney Reveals Inside Story

See also Volunteer Group Barred After Question Over Ties

See also When Giving Becomes Grounds for Dissolution

See also How Media Narrative Was Changed to Attack Faith

See also When Religious Intolerance Turns Violent

See also BBC, Bias, and the Weaponization of Language

Featured image above: Fumihiro Kato (加藤文宏) being interviewed. Photo: Sekai Nippo

[Editor’s note: The term 宗教2世 (shūkyō nisei, literally “second-generation religious believer”) generally refers to people who were raised in a religion by parents who belonged to a religious organization, rather than joining it themselves as adults.]

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