“Apology marriages” made by Japanese FFWPU/UC members to Korean men.
Updated July 17, 2022
The Korean based Unification Church (統一教会) uses the Comfort Women issue to recruit new Japanese young women. About 6,500 Japanese women are now missing after taking part in UC mass wedding ceremonies (合同結婚式) in South Korea. They are tricked into “apology marriages”, and into apology ceremonies (as in above photo) and apology tours in South Korea. This is because of false information about the comfort women issue from the time of the Japanese occupation of Korea between 1910-1945 – when WWII ended. Korean permanent residents in Japan are tricked to get new Japanese girls.
Before at least one of the “Blessings” in Korea, Mr. Kuboki, the Japanese national leader at the time, had a meeting for all the sisters in Tokyo the day before they flew. He warned them that they might be blessed to a Korean man who was not even a believer in the UC!
Some Japanese wives who have escaped from “apology marriages” have explained how, when they were beaten by their husbands, they believed they should accept the beatings as indemnity for how the Japanese kidnapped and beat Korean “comfort women” in Korea. Now they are realising that there were very few Japanese soldiers in Korea during the occupation because that is not where the Japanese were fighting. All the Japanese soldiers were needed elsewhere. It was Korean men and women who were doing most of the recruiting of Korean girls to be “comfort women” – and it was often Korean men and women who travelled from Korea with them, and ran the military brothels in China, Burma, Singapore and other countries. The Koreans had experience in the business.
What is happening in Cheongpyeong (清平,
チョンピョン), the holy land of the Unification Church?
The UC says that Japanese people’s health is being negatively affected by the vengeful ghosts, or spirits, of Korean comfort women. They also say that, due to Japanese activities during the Korean occupation and WWII, Japanese member’s health – and that of their families is deteriorating. To get better, members must visit the UC holy land in Korea, and pray and apologize to Koreans. The holy land is Cheongpyeong. When single Japanese young women went to Korea, they were sometimes tricked into participating in UC mass wedding ceremonies. These are considered to be apology marriages. Now many Japanese wives are missing, about 6,500 in total.
One Japanese woman explained: “The Church instructed me to go to Cheongpyeong to join in a service for the souls of Korean comfort women. Because the Japanese committed horrific crimes against Koreans during the war, the Japanese are all possessed by souls of these comfort women.”
Here are some of her notes from the lectures given at Cheongpyeong:
“Because of the souls of coerced comfort women, atopic patients and mental diseases will increase more and more in Japan.”
“Such souls have deep grudges and want to kill Japanese women through breast cancer or cancer of the uterus.”
These kinds of things are repeatedly stressed during the lectures given to the Japanese attending.
Ms. B had been feeling something wrong with her uterus. She was advised it was caused by the souls of comfort women. She then participated in an event at Cheongpyeong to exorcise such souls.
The number of complaints has been increasing during recent years. There have been about a thousand complaints per year. The amount of damages totaled more than 2.8 billion yen in one year.
Unification Church ex-member in Japan opens up about her dark past after mom became follower
July 15, 2022 (Mainichi Japan)
▲ Hiroshi Watanabe, a representative of the National Network of Lawyers Against Spiritual Sales, holds a “holy book” of the predecessor of the Family Federation for World Peace and Unification during a press conference in Tokyo’s Chiyoda Ward on July 12, 2022. (Mainichi/Shota Harumashi)
TOKYO – A woman in her 40s whose mother was a follower of the Family Federation for World Peace and Unification, commonly known as the Unification Church, and was driven to become a follower herself opened up about her experiences, saying that she was forced to lead an unfair life.
[The organization was founded in Korea in 1954 by Sun Myung Moon, and is now run by his widow, Hak Ja Han.]
The National Network of Lawyers Against Spiritual Sales, which provides relief measures to victims, held a press conference in Tokyo on July 12, after Tetsuya Yamagami, 41, a suspect arrested over the July 8 assassination of former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and sent to prosecutors on suspicion of murder, told investigators that his motive behind the shooting was that his mother was a follower of the Unification Church and his family disintegrated due to bankruptcy caused by her donations to the religious group.
The woman, an office worker in her 40s, attended the press conference and spoke of her experiences while concealing herself behind a screen at the venue, out of fear that she might be the target of online bashing.
“I was at an age where I couldn’t live without help from my parents, and it was difficult to reject them,” she said. While the Unification Church has explained that “donations are made by followers at their own will,” the woman criticized the religious group as being “full of lies.”
The woman was a high schooler when her mother began to devote herself to the religious group. Her mother eventually forced her three daughters, including the woman, to follow the Unification Church’s “teachings.” The woman also began to attend a church establishment, thinking that accepting her mother’s beliefs would make her a better daughter.
▲ A former follower of the Unification Church, who continues to suffer from her past, spoke of her experiences from behind a screen during a press conference held in Tokyo’s Chiyoda Ward on July 12, 2022. (Mainichi/Shota Harumashi)
In 1995, the woman, then aged 21, participated in a mass wedding held by the group. Under the system where the group matched followers who were strangers, the woman married a Korean man who was two years younger than her. After they began living together in Japan, he soon began to assault her, and the abuse continued even after they had a child. Though she wanted to file for divorce, she was told by her mother and other followers that she was at fault because she did “not show enough faith in the religion,” and that “a divorce would make Satan happy.”
Afterwards, she was assaulted by the man in front of her mother, and was allowed to divorce him, but remarried after being invited by the group to undergo another “blessing ceremony.” The woman said, “The group teaches the doctrine that you cannot go to heaven unless you’re a married couple. My mother was saddened that her daughter could not go to heaven. I also had feelings of guilt.”
Her second husband was also a Korean man selected by the group, and the woman moved to South Korea. She said the group demanded that she donate 1.4 million yen, or about $10,000. “My partner made false reports about his academic background, occupation, and age. He used my credit cards and other things, and I was forced into personal bankruptcy by my husband,” she said.
The woman, who returned to Japan in 2013, said, “When I was in high school, I was placed in a family environment where I needed to obey my parents. I didn’t have the power to go against them.” Though the woman is no longer a follower, she says that as a former devotee who was a child of a follower, she cannot reach out to anyone to talk about her experience.
The National Network of Lawyers Against Spiritual Sales has received inquiries from former followers nationwide who say that they are still pressured by the group to make donations. The number of consultations reached 47 in 2021, with financial damage totaling 331.53 million yen (about $2.38 million).
The lawyers’ network has continued to ask Diet members to refrain from taking actions that may be viewed as declaring support to the Unification Church and affiliated groups. In September 2021, it also sent a statement of protest to former Prime Minister Abe, who had sent a video message to a gathering held by an organization affiliated with the Unification Church. The statement read, “We’d like you to carefully consider the matter for your own prestige.” However, the letter which was sent to the office of the Diet members’ building was reportedly rejected and returned.
As reasons for the Unification Church to develop ties with politicians, lawyer Hiroshi Yamaguchi cited factors, such as making it difficult for investigations to reach the group, gaining trust from followers when spreading the teachings, and to realize the group’s beliefs such as opposition against same-sex marriage. Yamaguchi showed concern that politicians’ support for the religious group “may lead to the creation of new victims.”
The woman in her 40s also looked back on her experience and said, “Seeing photos of the group’s founder [Sun Myung Moon] meeting former Prime Minister Nobusuke Kishi (Abe’s grandfather) and former Soviet Union President Mikhail Gorbachev made me believe that he really is an amazing figure.”
(Japanese original by Shota Harumashi, Tokyo City News Department)
“The reality is that they are the despicable people who continue the activities to tailor Japanese women to be the slaves of Koreans – all under a mask of justice!”
Japanese woman recruited and sold by FFWPU to a Korean farmer
MARRIAGE AS A PILGRIMAGE TO THE FATHERLAND:
The case of Japanese women in the Unification Church
by Ms. Hyun-Mee Kim.
This report was published in Korea on March 3, 2016:
Drawing on cases of Japanese women’s conversion narratives and everyday practices of married life, this article examines the religious nature of transnational marriage between Japanese women and Korean men through the Unification Church. I use the term pilgrimage from these women’s perspective, because they view their marriages as a religious journey for salvation to the ‘fatherland’ of Reverend Moon, the founder of the Unification Church, and not based on romance or economic motivation. These Japanese women aspire to fulfil the mission of accomplishing ‘a true family’ for world peace through marriage with Korean men who they had never met in person earlier. A true family, according to the Unification Church, is the only way of reaching salvation, through marriage that transcends race, religion and the nation-state. I explore how the Unification Church propagates the notion of repentance and salvation, by making the Japanese women who follow them to become unconditionally devoted subjects of the Korean patriarchal family and church.
Asian Journal of Women’s Studies, Volume 22, Issue 1, 2016, pages 16-34.
Notes on contributor
KIM Hyun Mee is professor at the Department of Cultural Anthropology and Graduate Program in Culture and Gender Studies, Yonsei University, South Korea. Her research interests include gender and migration, feminist cultural theories, city and human ecology and globalization and labor. She is the author of Cultural Translation in a Global Era (2005) and We always leave home: Becoming migrants in South Korea (2014), and co-editor of Intimate Enemy: How Neoliberalism has become our everyday lives (2010), and We are all people with differences: Towards multiculturalism for co-existence (2013). She was a Committee Member of the Division of Human Rights for Foreigners, National Human Rights Commission of Korea (2008–2010) and is a member of the Forum on Human Rights for Migrant Women in South Korea.
Abstract in Korean
이 논문은 통일교를 통해 이루어지는 일본인 여성과 한국인 남성 간의 초국적 결혼의 종교적 성격에 대한 연구다. 한국에 거주하는 일본 여성들을 대상으로 한 심층면접을 통해 이들의 개종서사와 결혼 생활의 일상적인 실천을 분석한다. 일본인 여성들은 한국 남성과의 국제결혼을 일종의 종교적 순례로 이해한다. 즉, 로맨스나 경제적인 동기에 의해 추동된 결혼이 아니라, 구원을 위해 통일교의 창시자인 문 목사의 ‘조국’으로 오는 종교적 여정으로 보는 경향이 강하다. 면접에 참여한 일본인 여성들은 세계 평화를 위해 ‘참가정’을 이룩하라는 종교적 임무를 완수하고자 하고, 결혼 이전에는 일면식도 없는 한국인 남자와 결혼한다. 통일교에 따르면 구원에 이르기 위한 유일한 길은 참가정을 이룩하는 것이며, 이는 인종, 언어, 국민 국가를 초월하는 교차적이며 가교적 결혼을 통해 가능하다. 이 논문은 통일교가 일본인 여성을 한국의 가부장적 가족과 교회에 무조건적으로 헌신적인 주체를 만들면서 회개와 구원의 개념을 구성해가는 방식을 분석한다.
Keywords: Japan, South Korea, gender, pilgrimage, religion, transnational marriage, Unification Church
Keywords: 순례, 일본, 젠더, 종교, 국제결혼, 통일교, 한국