Marco Respinti
Jul 26, 2024
A victim is treated as a perpetrator, to the point that the Japanese government is requesting its dissolution as a religious organization.
被害者が加害者のように扱われ、日本政府が宗教団体としての解散を求めるほどだ。
*Remarks delivered at the General Assembly of The Japanese Committee for the International Coalition for Religious Freedom, on the theme “Religious Freedom and Future of Democracy,” held at the Kaiun Club, in Tokyo, Japan, on July 22, 2024.
I speak to you today as a journalist, serving as Director-in-Charge of “Bitter Winter: A Magazine on Religious Liberty and Human Rights.”
This is a successful original enterprise that combines media people, activists, and scholars who are deeply committed to defend freedom of religion or belief (FoRB) for everyone, everywhere, always, and to denounce the persecution of believers.
Religious persecution or intolerance threatens believers all over the world, taking different shapes but always aiming at the same goal of curtailing or even denying religious liberty.
But religious liberty is not an accident that human beings and societies can do without. It is the pillar of any viable commonwealth, founds true democracy, and helps securing all different rights and protections to citizens.
Religious liberty is in fact the first political human right. It is the right to believe or not to believe in God, the Supreme Being, or any supernatural, overarching, and all-encompassing cosmic entity or force that rules the universe, and to live consequently. It is not sufficient to leave human beings alone to believe in the privacy of their houses. Believers should have the liberty to worship publicly and organize their personal and communal lives accordingly.
No power, state, church, organization can curtail or deny that right.
Also, religious liberty is not relativism or pick-and-choose. It is the fundamental right of every human being to believe that an ultimate truth exists and to live by it.
Let us consider the case of Japan, where we are now. I come from Europe as an admirer of its lively culture and vibrant democracy. Tokyo, its capital city, is a marvelous blending of ancient and modern, house to millions of law-abiding citizens, and one of the most industrious centers of the world.
Yet, Japan it is also the place where a great abuse is being committed. I am referring to the case of the Family Federation for World Peace and Unification (formerly known as the Unification Church) and the order of its dissolution that the Japanese government is seeking before the Tokyo District Court.
“Bitter Winter” has followed the case closely and has been quite assertive in denouncing it as an absurd.
All began with the assassination of former Prime Minister, Abe Shinzo (1954-2022), on July 8, 2022.
The Family Federation was in fact made somewhat responsible for it to the point of requesting its dissolution as a religious organization.
The assassin, Tetsuya Yamagami, said he was motivated by his intention to punish Abe for his collaboration with the Family Federation out of the hatred he felt for it when his mother went bankrupt in 2002, allegedly after her excessive donations to the group.
Many shadows remain on the case, including why the assassin waited for twenty years after his mother’s bankruptcy to kill Abe.
But here we have an organization that is at the end of the day punished for a crime it never committed.
Abe paid a high price, the Family Federation is paying a high price, but the villain was solely the assassin. No one else but him should be made accountable for that heinous crime.
Instead, an old campaign was revamped by lawyers and others hostile to the Family Federation mostly for political reasons, as they resented for decades its successful sponsorship of anti-Communist initiatives. Other groups that had even less to do with the Abe assassination such as the Jehovah’s Witnesses are now also targeted.
All decent and democratic people should be worried of measures that are reminiscent of practices current in the People’s Republic of China and in the Russian Federation. Of course, Japanese authorities do not want to be associated with such rogue states. For this reason, they should redress their wrongdoings against the Family Federation and other religious minorities. This great country does not deserve this injustice.
