Episode 78:
My Mother's Heaven, But My Family's Hell: 30 Years of Religious Torture

Across Korea and Japan, the hidden reality behind the powerful Family Federation for World Peace and Unification (FFWPU) is finally beginning to surface — its influence over corporations and political figures in both countries is honestly shocking. For decades the Church accumulated enormous wealth and devoted followers. But its collapse began after the assassination of one politician.

At 11:30 a.m. on July 8, 2022, a street campaign was underway in Nara, Japan, ahead of an election. The most notable figure there that day was Shinzo Abe, who had served as Japan's Prime Minister for eight years and eight months.

The moment he appeared, applause erupted, followed by a three-minute speech — then a gunshot tore through the scene. Bodyguards threw themselves toward him, a second shot rang out, and Abe collapsed on stage, bullets through his neck and upper left arm. He died shortly after from blood loss. The shooter, arrested at the scene, was forty-one-year-old Tetsuya Yamagami, who had built his own shotgun and stalked several of Abe's speeches for years, waiting for the right moment.

A Church Built on Postwar Guilt

The FFWPU was founded in Korea in 1954 by Sun Myung Moon, who declared himself the second coming of Christ and preached a single nation transcending country, ethnicity, and gender. He built his following on the chaos of postwar Korea, offering psychological comfort to a shattered, impoverished population. But the Church grew far larger in Japan than in Korea: roughly 20,000 members in Korea against an estimated 200,000 devoted followers, and over a million counting looser adherents, in Japan.

Moon exploited Japan's postwar guilt directly, teaching that donations and arranged marriages to Korean men could cleanse the sins of colonial rule. Under his instruction, believers who had never met were married off in mass wedding ceremonies of up to sixty thousand people at once, each paying roughly $10,000 as an offering — a single event capable of raising millions. Divorce was treated as sin, trapping couples in loveless, church-dictated marriages. Behind the scenes, Moon had struck a deal with Japan's LDP before ever launching the religion there: guaranteed freedom to operate in exchange for followers' votes, brokered through former Prime Minister Nobusuke Kishi — Shinzo Abe's own grandfather, who let the Church establish its Japanese branch on his land. That alliance carried through Kishi's son and then to Abe himself.

A Family Bled Dry

Yamagami's mother, referred to by the alias Sato, fell into the Church's orbit in 1991 after her husband's suicide left her raising three children alone, followed by her eldest son's cancer diagnosis and blindness. The Church's doctrine offered her an explanation for the suffering — that it wasn't her fault, but the unresolved sins of her ancestors — and a solution: donate enough, and the sins would be cleansed. She paid roughly $145,000 for a single "Haewon" ancestral-cleansing ritual, then another $220,000 when nothing improved, convinced she simply hadn't given enough.

She emptied the family's corporate funds, sold the house, and moved the children into a run-down apartment — an estimated $720,000 or more funneled to the Church over the years, even after she filed for bankruptcy, at which point she began taking out loans just to keep donating. The children went without proper meals and gave up on college. In 2005, believing his death would bring the family insurance money, Yamagami's older brother attempted suicide; their mother was in Korea at a Church gathering when it happened and chose to stay for the leader's sermon rather than return. When the story became public, the Church quietly returned a fraction of the donations as hush money — nowhere near what had been taken. Yamagami gave his share to his younger sister, and when Sato found out, she accused him of stealing from the church's "karma" and demanded it back.

The Turning Point

Sun Myung Moon died in 2012, and for a moment outsiders hoped the Church might finally collapse. Instead his wife, Hakja Han, took over as leader, declaring herself God's direct descendant and further cementing the organization's grip. In 2015, Yamagami's older brother took his own life, and the suppressed hatred Yamagami had carried for years turned into an obsession with destroying the Church — he began studying firearms online and building a shotgun by hand, initially hoping to target the leadership directly, but tight security around Han in Korea made that plan impossible.

The pivot came when Yamagami found footage of a 2021 event called THINK TANK 2022, an ostensibly nonpartisan political and academic gathering that drew video messages from figures including Donald Trump and Shinzo Abe — but was, in fact, hosted by the FFWPU as a platform to display its political reach. Realizing that his family's ruin traced not just to the Church and his mother but to the political system protecting it, Yamagami settled on Abe, the figure within his reach, as his target.

Final Thoughts

On July 8, 2022, hastily arranged security around a last-minute campaign speech gave Yamagami the opening he'd waited six years for. As of 2026, his trial is still ongoing, with experts predicting a life sentence despite his tragic upbringing. His mother attended the proceedings and, according to witnesses, looked at her son with pure hatred as she told the court she still believed in the Church and had no intention of leaving — insisting the leader would forgive all of their sins.

The assassination forced a reckoning: in March 2025, Japan formally ordered the dissolution of the FFWPU's Japanese branch, stripping its recognition as a religion. Even so, followers still travel to Korea to hear sermons from Hakja Han, and organizations formed by other victims like Yamagami continue speaking out against the Church to this day.