Half of Japan's LDP lawmakers had ties with Unification Church

Giving my mom a pair of headphones doesn't feel that religious to me.

Modern Christmas is essentially a non-religious celebration, unless if you go to church. It is mostly about family gathering and gift giving, so even atheists have no problem with that.

Christmas itself has its roots in "pagan" tradition not Christian. More aptly Old Norse. During the conversion of Scandinavia is when this change occured. Though it appears in every cultural group similarly as the winter solstice which is not religious.

The religious rituals they participate in are things like going to the shrine at New Years to pray, paying money to the local shrine for blessings for birth, new house, etc.

Not something like putting up a Christmas tree and giving presents, maybe more like going to Christmas Eve and Easter sermons.

Indeed, most religious-origin festivals are celebrated by atheists as well.

As an atheist, I enjoy the culture and tradition associated with such events. Asian festivals have lots of lights and colors and rituals have dancing, singing, and art forms alongside. All of these come with tasty and nutritious food.

In some ways, I feel we’ve lost this beautiful richness in our modern non-religious lifestyles.

Christmas as "celebrated" by atheists is not a religious ritual. We gather (sometimes), eat, drink, and give presents to kids. Just like in birthdays (also not religious).

Any party or celebration is in some sense a ritual, just not necessarily a religious ritual.

The word is superstitious. Other parts of Asia (like China) often claim no religious belief but are _very_ superstitious too.

> Wouldn't both a Buddhist and a believer in Shintoism tend to answer no to "belief in God"?

Shintoism == believe in many "gods" or spirits, but not one singular "God".

+1 on the "superstition" points here.

Source: my wife is Japanese. Also, I've seen "Spirited Away" more times than I care to say.

buddhists do believe in GOD, just not the same way christians do.

Anyone who claims its athiest is mistaken and hasn't done enough research into it.

Can't speak on real shintoism, I don't know anything about it, but the meiji era state-shintoism held the emperor as their deity.

Rural districts having more "voting power" is not gerrymandering.

As is often mentioned in motorsport: "To finish first, first you must finish".

The Japanese can be pragmatic to a fault. Being in the LDP more or less guarantees that you'll 'finish'. You may then focus your efforts on implementing the changes you're able to.

Plenty of religions were happy to add Jesus to their pantheon too.

Does a ritual, if performed with some expectation of it having an effect on your life beyond the act of its own doing, not also imply a belief in supernatural entities?

Seeing it from the outside, the LDP seems like Japan's Republican party, Komeito is the Evangelical Christian bloc, and Abe is your basic Conservative running on American exceptionalism and traditional cultural values.

The biggest obvious difference is the failure of the LDP to successfully repeal Article 9, but as I understand it, that doesn't have nearly as much popular support in Japan as war posturing does in the US.

Britain lurched to the right after Margaret Thatcher but that didn't keep Labor from being in power for a few years (by co-opting the Tory program the same way Clinton co-opted Reagan) Germany, Israel, France, and numerous countries with parliamentary systems have power alternate between parties.

As for "opposition to conservatives everywhere is often much more fractured" that makes me think of an observation I've had which is that conservatives in the US are united by the idea that there is a way that things are "spozed" to be whereas what passes for the left in the US are a groups of people who perceive themselves to either be outgroups or be supportive of outgroups. The problem is that racial/ethnic groups such as blacks or latinos don't automatically support, say, transsexual maximalism. Environmentalism is still perceived as a "white thing" even though blacks are worse off when it comes to exposure to toxics. "Environmental racism" as an issue just hasn't sold.

No, it's the proper article, journalist covering an information, up to various investigators to figure out the links

As for the traitor thing, it's what the population is saying, try to get in touch with students, it's what contributed to the assassination of Abe and the current events (majority of the population against a national funeral, why? it was their prime minister, such figure this disliked?)

My personal opinion: You don't assassinate your prime minister over a donation to a religious group, you do it because you are a nationalist and you punish act of treason

I don't think these ties make him as unpopular as you think. The third link is also from a heavily biased source.

Be careful saying things like "psychotic Japanese fascism" here. You can expect @dang to slap your hand for spreading "nationalistic flamebait." Why they don't put something like this in the guidelines is beyond me.

Semi-agree, but I think there are 2 fundamental differences between established religions and cults:

1. Complete shunning of non-cult members, and even harsher shunning of ex-members. This one may be a gray area, as certainly many religions identify all members of other religions as "going to hell", and I know Mormons who have been excommunicated for being gay. Still, the level of ostracism in mainstream religions is nothing compared to, for example, what happens if you try to leave Scientology. Scientologists declare you a "subversive person", stalk you, and essentially try to ruin you. I know many folks who have left the Catholic church, but in all honestly the Catholic church still tries to welcome them back with open arms.

2. Be secretive about the details of the cult before you are "bought in". Say what you will about organized religion, but it's pretty trivial to get the full text of the Bible, Koran, and other religious writings. Meanwhile, Scientology requires you to pay thousands and thousands of dollars to slowly get access to their screeds, and they have gone after ex-members who have attempted to publish this information.

Yes in the sense that all religion has a dose of magical thinking, but not in the sense that cults are a specific set of practices that set them aside from mainstream religion.

Shunning of members, cutting ties to non-cult people, taking over the finances of their members (and forcing them to donate).

There are some gray areas and some mainstream congregations can cross into cult-like behavior, but in general, there is a demarcation.

> What exactly separates a "cult" from any other church?

Usually the difference between a cult and a sect is how hard it is to leave it. church more usually define practice of the "established religions" or as long as it stay close enough to it.

While I won't suggest this is society's distinction between the two, in my mind it's about what happens if you exert independent thought that conflicts with the institution's beliefs and what happens if you attempt to leave the group. Many ex-Mormons claim their former church is a cult and that life in Mormon dominated areas become very difficult for those who have left the faith. Same for Jehovah's Witness but the impact is smaller because not many areas are dominated by them and you don't have to move far to get away from it. On the other hand, the worst cults will hunt you down across the country (and possibly the Earth) if your existence is offensive enough to them, which isn't something typically seen when leaving a mainstream Christian religion. A Mormon in Alabama leaving the church isn't likely to face much social ostracism while a Southern Baptist might, especially if they reject Christianity entirely, but their life isn't likely to be in danger.

I think in this case it would be more similar if all of the party members were part of the same minority denomination. While most U.S. polititions are Christian, they are members of mostly independent churches that are organized into separate denominations. That is one reason that we have generally been wary of Catholic politicians - because we don't want our government to be under the influence of the Pope.

Lifted from Wikipedia:

"[H]is mother had given the church about 100 million yen (US$720,000), a parcel of land she had inherited from her father, and the house where she lived with her three children; she subsequently declared bankruptcy in 2002. She had continued donating to the church following the bankruptcy. A male relative later recalled being contacted by Yamagami and his siblings to complain that they had no food at home, prompting the relative to deliver meals and money for living expenses. [..] Yamagami's older brother, who had a longtime struggle with cancer, was not able to afford medical treatment; he died by suicide in 2015."

To me, that sounds quite a bit worse than your average Christian church.

There are certainly some predatory Christian hucksters out there; people like Kenneth "I need my private jet to spread the gospel" Copeland spring to mind, but there are many more (as well as many more abusive ones). Religion is often a comparatively "easy" target for abuse.

However, the religion of Christianity as a whole isn't centred around the concept of "send me your money". I think that's the main difference: is the religion as a whole primarily centred around abuse, or is it just various groups within the religion that operate like that?

There are plenty of cults within Christianity, but Christianity as a whole?

I'm sure there are more formal and academic descriptions, and things can become a bit tricky around the edges for sure, but I find "is it primarily centred around abuse of its members?" to be a reasonably workable every-day distinction.

The difference is that Christianity has a huge amount of buy in among the American people. The unification church can’t really say the same about the Japanese people, and in some ways in antithetical to the LDPs nationalistic politics since the church is run by Koreans.

Agreed about Christianity, disagreed that it's the only difference.

There is a set of cult-like behavior that distinguishes modern cults from mainstream established religions. Those practices are an important distinction.

Also, the mindset required to join a fringe or secretive cult today that shuns the rest of society, and is shunned by society in turn, seems relevant to me.

You're technically correct, but I think that's a different definition of the word "cult" from the colloquial, and from what is being used above. Wikipedia's definition describes a cult as "unusual," "socially deviant," and "novel." I don't think Christianity fits that description in America.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cult

In Utah that situation would have majority popular support.

As a politician, it is not desirable to be connected to the Mormon church (they want to put their finger on the scales, you have to tithe a lot, etc).

You want the credentials but not the cost, or you end up in a very hard balancing act with a lot of internal politics.

There are Mormon politicians in Utah - but not as many as you would think. It looks like currently three Utah districts have Mormon reps.

Locally you may see a lot more Mormons as the political balancing act is overall easier.

There's no difference, it's just that evangelical cults are much bigger and more accepted in the US.

This is the "everyone who disagrees with me is a Nazi" problem.

Evangelicals are distinct from cults. You may dislike both, in the same way you can dislike peanut butter and chocolate, but that doesn't mean they are the same or identical.

(There are also Evangelical cults but that is a small percentage of Evangelicals)

You could spin it around even further to say there's a bunch of Canadian politicians with ties to evangelical american churches.

America fits the bill as a country with nuclear ambitions, and has done plenty of unfavourable trade shenanigans that said politicians have let slide

The bijection you are looking for might be the evangelical groups in the US (including some politicians) who support Israel because they believe that if all jews return there, the eschaton will begin. Think what you will about their goals, it is difficult to reconcile the literal apocalypse as "good for America."

3. Yes, this is very unique problem in Japan and that's why it is difficult to see this issue.

> But, we aren't that different , really.

I am not sure if I understand your point. Both U.S. and Japan have relatively loose regulation against cult groups, but as a Japanese citizen, I think this situation should be changed.

>[1] The church is pretty small only making up about 27 people and was mainly sending medical supply's and food to the island not funding what you may call a "dictatorships" They were mostly advocating for the us to remove its blockade on cube and reestablish relations with the island

>[2] more of the same just church's sending aid to a country that's in economic turmoil the article title is blatant fear mongering

The fact that we aren't that different does not negate the fact that the problem needs to be solved.

I scoured articles trying to understand this, too! Is it simply the intersection of money/free volunteer labor and politics where money just wins?

On the other hand we have something similar in the USA so who am I to judge? :)

One party in our two party system appears to have lots of Russian connections now for some reason, and this does not bother most of their supporters which has approximately 45-50 percent of the population behind it. In past years this would have led to claims about treason or something similar from the same party, the path from Nixon to now it appears the only change has been how public the cooperation between the GOP leadership and countries openly antagonistic to the USA, i.e. Nixon/Kissinger with North Vietnam, Reagan/Bush with Iran and Trump with Russia.

The history is even weirder: check out the story of Kishi Nobusuke[0], the class A war crimminal who brought the Unification Church into the Japanese political mainstream. Also the Yakuza. Also he's Abe's grandad.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobusuke_Kishi

It made more sense during the Cold War because they were all very anti-communist, no idea when and why the Unification Church is now supportive of North Korea.

Sun Myung Moon used fight against communism as a tool to establish a close relationship with LDP. Please refer to the article by Asahi shinbun. https://www.asahi.com/ajw/articles/14693688 Kishi Nobusuke, Shinzo Abe's grandfather, and Sun Myung Moon together found IFVC(International Federation for Victory over Communism).

Long story short, Japanese politicians should have known better.

Yes and no. It is odd only in the sense that the actions contradict the rhetoric. But both parties are still achieving their own goals and the cooperation does not cancel out that goal.

We often think of nationalism purely as the dark side of in-group/out-group dynamics scaled up to the size of an entire country. They are, but there's a dark, darker, yet darker side to this. The driving force behind those dynamics is a desire to purge the in-group of perceived weakness. There are plenty of reasons for a Korean person to hate Japanese people, or vice versa, but the reason that nationalists will consistently pick is that the out-group is "inferior". War crimes, national insults, and so on are all just window-dressing to that core claim.

This same dynamic also applies to things you would not consider to be even in the same postal code as right-wing nationalism. Think about how much self-policing and internal policing happens in niche subcultures online to purge them of perceived weakness, and how many of the perpetrators of those purges are not much different from their targets. Nationalists care more about punishing their own citizens than fighting the enemy.

For those skimming, Aum Shinrikyo is the cult responsible for the Tokyo subway sarin attack. What's often overlooked is that the cult synthesized the sarin gas themselves in a self-made sophisticated chemical weapons lab:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tokyo_subway_sarin_attack#Chem...

When their headquarters were raided, police found enough weaponry to fight a small war:

>Over the next week, the full scale of Aum's activities was revealed for the first time. At the cult's headquarters in Kamikuishiki on the foot of Mount Fuji, police found explosives, chemical weapons, and a Russian Mil Mi-17 military helicopter. While the finding of biological warfare agents such as anthrax and Ebola cultures was reported, those claims now appear to have been widely exaggerated.[52] There were stockpiles of chemicals that could be used for producing enough sarin to kill four million people.[53]

They bought a sheep farm in Australia to mine uranium in order to enrich it and build nuclear weapons:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banjawarn_Station#Aum_Shinriky...

Had they not been caught, I have little doubt they'd have eventually succeeded.

Japan and Korea have a cult crisis, a lot of them Christian: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_new_religions https://www.france24.com/en/20181122-mission-god-south-korea... https://thediplomat.com/2014/06/the-cults-of-south-korea/

Yes generalizations are the real solution. Wait weren't those the things that started racism and colonialism...? the things you seemed to be concerned about?

Also both the Yellow Turban and Taiping Tianguo are millenarian groups that arise during bad times. They’re not all that different from political movements that seek to rebel against the state, just with less rational-seeming ideologies. But to the discontented, it’s very rational.

Also, those groups existed hundreds of years apart from each other, let alone from Aum Shinrikyo.

They don't gas major Subway

Why don't you build a HN-GPT3 site? Perhaps you can also summarize comments. Might be interesting.

One version of this is in the lobster article I linked in my other, longish, comment here.

Anyone pursuing this further might be interested in Lobster Magazine's 1991 piece by Jeffrey M Bale: The Moonies, WACL and the Korean CIA (see [1])

Regards Japan, though it's primarily concerned with "the links between the UC and the South Korean Central Intelligence Agency (KCIA)" and "the intimate connection between the UC and the World Anti-Communist League, an international umbrella organization encompassing numerous extreme right and neo-Nazi groups", the article finds that "the real key to the WACL-Moon link probably lies in Japan, and I must therefore trace the development of the Japanese UC before trying to clarify this link."

And trace it he does, over several dense but fascinating paragraphs detailing relationships between UC precursor Genri Undo, "kuromaku"[2], Japanese ultranationalists and organized crime figures, including Yoshio Kodama [3], whose two lieutenants Ryoichi Sasagama and Osami Kuboki "took an early interest in [Genri Undo]" with Kuboki becoming president of the "World Christian Unification Holy Ghost Church", spearheading the UC presence in Japan.

To give a taster, here's Bale on Kodama (the numbers in parens are footnotes):

> To cite just one example, he provided 6.5 million yen through an intermediary -- ultranationalist gangster Karoku Tsuji -- to his Sugamo cellmate Ichiro Hatoyama for the purpose of establishing the Minshu To (Democratic Party), a new conservative party controlled by depurged prewar rightist politicians who were unable to obtain a dominant position in Prime Minister Shigeru Yoshida's bureaucrat-controlled Jiyu To (Liberal Party). (212)

> Following the election of Hatoyama as Prime Minister, the two parties merged in 1955 to become the Jiyuminshu To (Liberal Democratic Party or LDP), the highly conservative pro-American party which has almost single-handedly ruled Japan up to the present day.

> Since then, Kodama has often brought decisive pressure to bear on the factional struggles within the LDP, including arranging for the reelection of Nobusuke Kishi, another Sugamo cellmate, in 1959, as well as helping Eisaku Sato become Prime Minister in 1964. He also maintained close relations with other LDP politicians, such as the yakusa-connected LDP Vice President Bamboku Ono, (213) and his influence did not suffer a major setback until he was identified as the key 'fixer' in the Lockheed Corporation bribery scandal. (214)

> In addition to these political activities and his 'legitimate' business operations, Kodama also became involved with numerous postwar ultranationalist and yakuza organisations, including the Matsuba Kai (Pine Needles Society), the Kokusiu Kai (National Essence Society), and the Gijin To (Righteous Men's or Martyrs' Party). (215) He served as an advisor to the predominantly Korean yakuza group led by Hisayuki Machii (born Gon-Yong Chong), the Tosei Kai (Eastern Voice Society), and organized the Kofu Kurabu (Friendly Relations Club) in 1965. (216)

1: http://www.8bitmode.com/rogerdog/lobster/lobster21.pdf

2: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/kuromaku

3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yoshio_Kodama

"Set up" and "supported" are extremely different things in my mind. I donate to organisations, but I do not take credit for founding them.

Better link https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIA_activities_in_Japan

It is so crazy that someone like Kishi, who largely responsible for WW2, became politician again after WW2, then his grandson, Shinzo Abe, was also prime minister. I really don't understand why people support these politicians. I don't think the way Japanese people think of their politicians have changed before and after WW2. I just feel sad to see the current situation of this country.

More than half of People never vote. Things will never be changed. I feel so powerless.

Directly infiltrating one of these groups is easier than the other, depending on your skin colour. And I'm not certain it can be called illegal if it is an agent of the law acting under legal authorisation.

This is nonsense. The NoI advocates genocide, committed the Hanfai massacare, and numerous other atrocities.