By Max Sato
(MaceNews) – Prime Minister Fumio Kishida’s bid to turn around sliding voter support with a cabinet shuffle seems to have backfired, with opinion surveys indicating the public is increasingly unhappy with further revelations that conservative ruling party lawmakers have had cozy ties with the Unification Church.
The cult, which was founded in Seoul in 1954 by the late Sun Myung Moon, has been accused for decades in Japan for brainwashing followers into donating large amounts of cash, buying expensive religious goods and marrying strangers at mass weddings, according to news reports and testimony in courts.
Kishida shuffled his cabinet on Aug. 10 to replace some ministers who had been found to have relationships with the church, but some of the new and existing members have confirmed they had either paid for or participated in rallies sponsored by the church.
People are venting frustration in social media over many politicians’ accounts that they didn’t know the organizers of those events were linked to the church, with some even saying they had no idea about the church doctrine.
Kishida, who has cancelled planned trips to Africa and the Middle East after testing positive for Covid-19 during the weekend, is now working remotely from his official residence.
“It is important that (cabinet members) explain what has happened in the past and terminate their relationship with this type of organization so that the government won’t draw any suspicion,” Kishida told reporters via video conference Monday, referring to the church.
The approval rating of the Kishida government plunged to 36%, the lowest since its inauguration last October, according to the latest polled conducted on Aug. 20 and 21 by the Mainichi Shimbun daily and Social Survey Research Center. It was down 16 percentage points from the 52% rating in the previous poll conducted on July 16 and 17.
The disapproval rating stood at 54%, up 17 points from the 37% recorded in the July poll.
On the relationship between the ruling Liberal Democratic Party and the church, 64% said it was “extremely problematic” while 23% said it was “somewhat problematic,” the Mainichi poll showed.
A weekend poll by TV Asahi also showed the Kishida approval rating slumped to 43.7%, down 9.9 points from its previous survey in July. Even a weekend survey by the conservative Sankei Shimbun daily and its Fuji TV network indicated voter support slipped to 54.2%, down 8.1 points from their previous poll on July 23-24.
Before the cabinet shuffle, a survey conducted from Aug. 5 to Aug. 7 by public broadcaster NHK, showed the Kishida cabinet’s approval rating had slumped to 46% from 59% three weeks earlier, compared with 49% when the government was sworn in last October. The disapproval rating rose to 28% from 23%, the highest for the current administration.
Many of those polled before and after the cabinet shuffle said they believed that LDP lawmakers had not given a full account of their relationship with the Unification Church.
The mainstream Japanese media were careful about even mentioning the Unification Church in their initial reporting of the assassination of Shinzo Abe, Japan’s longest-serving prime minister, and just said personal grudge over “a certain religious group” appeared to be the motive.
Abe was killed during a campaign speech on July 8 by a gunman who said he believed Abe was promoting the beliefs of the Unification Church. The suspect was reported to have said his mother had donated large amounts of money to the church, bankrupting the family.
Typical of the mainstream media in Japan, they began wide-ranging campaigns to disclose all kinds of relationships that lawmakers have had with the church after lawyers representing former followers and freelance journalists shed light on the well-known fact about close ties between the church and conservative politicians for decades and revelations on more recent cases.
One example is Koichi Hagiuda, a conservative lawmaker in the Abe faction, the biggest in the LDP.
Kishida removed Hagiuda from the cabinet as the Minister for Economy, Trade and Industry in the Aug. 10 shuffle due to reported close ties that he has had with the church, and installed him as the chair of the LDP Policy Research Council.
Initially Hagiuda was vague about the relationship but has now said he visited a facility related to Unification Church. Japan’s TBS TV reported that he had delivered a speech at a church event in the past, asking the audience to help bring the LDP back to power by voting for the party.
Abe’s grandfather Nobusuke Kishi was prime minister from 1957 to 1960 and is known to have cultivated ties with the Unification Church and the International Federation for Victory over Communism, the latter group also formed by South Korea’s Moon in 1968. Kishi had been imprisoned as a suspected Class A war criminal but was later released by U.S. occupation authorities in the interests of the U.S .government fight against communism.
The Unification Church penetrated the Japanese political system by sending volunteers to work mainly for LDP election campaigns. Many politicians were complacent about accepting donations from the church and gave speeches at church events billed as promoting “world peace.”
The church changed its name to the Family Federation for World Peace and Unification in 1994 in a move criticized by lawyers and former followers as an attempt to whitewash its image.
In Japan, the church’s application for changing its registered name was rejected by the government in 1997 but was swiftly approved in 2015 under the Abe administration, allegedly under the influence of then education minister Hakubun Shimomura, according to Japanese news reports.
Contact this reporter: max@macenews.com
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