Wearing a Yankees cap, Japanese Prime Minister Nobusuke Kishi throws out the first ball, June 23, 1957, at Yankee Stadium. He watched the first game of a double header between Chicago and the Yankees. Left to right, unidentified lady, Mrs. Casey Stengel, Casey Stengel, Nobusuke Kishi, Al Lopez, Manager of White Sox.

Photo: Ray Howard for the AP via the Wall St. Journal

Slain former prime minister Shinzo Abe was the son of a foreign minister, and grandson of another prime minister, Nobusuke Kishi. Grandpa Kishi was a member of the wartime junta and was arrested by the Americans as a suspected war criminal. But he escaped the hangman and in the mid-1950s helped found the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), which has ruled Japan ever since. Some people joke Japan is a one-party state. It isn't. But it's reasonable to ask why Japan continues to re-elect a party run by an entitled elite, which yearns to scrap American-imposed pacifism, but has failed to improve living standards for 30 years.

Rupert Wingfield-Hayes, ‘Japan was the future but it's stuck in the past’, BBC

Rip bozo

The relationship between the Unification Church and Japanese political circles

The relationship between the Unification Church and Japanese political circles is being all the more highlighted due to the religious movement’s enormous success in Japan

https://english.hani.co.kr/arti/english_edition/e_international/1050672.html

By Cho Yeon-hyun, religion correspondent

July 12, 2022 17:55 KST

Reports have surfaced that Tetsuya Yamagami, the man who fatally shot former Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, referenced his mother’s religion — the Unification Church — as the motivation for his actions, drawing interest to the religious movement.

While being questioned by police Yamagami reportedly said that his mother is “a follower of the Unification Church” and that he had “targeted Abe due to his ties” to the group. Additionally, he reportedly stated that he “originally wanted to target the leader of the Unification Church [Hak Ja Han],” but believing it would be difficult, he’d attacked Abe, believing the former prime minister of Japan to have ties with the church.

Following her husband’s death, Yamagami’s mother took over his construction company until she went bankrupt 20 years ago. [on August 21, 2002] Regarding this, Yamagami reportedly was resentful of the Unification Church, as he believed his mother — a follower of the church — made large donations to the religious movement.

________________

The Unification Church sought members by reading obituary columns in newspapers to identify grieving relatives or spouses. They would pay a visit to console and recruit them. Yamagami’s father died shortly before his mother was recruited.

After Tetsuya Yamagami’s mother was recruited into the Unification Church her three children had nothing to eat.

The Crime That Killed Shinzo Abe

________________

The Unification Church released a statement Monday, in which it said that Yamagami “is not a member of the Family Federation for World Peace and Unification (FFWPU), and there are no records indicating he was a member of the federation in the past.” The church added that the suspect’s mother has been attending Family Federation events once a month.

According to Japanese media, Yamagami reportedly “believed [Abe] had ties [with the Unification Church] due to a video message he sent [to the church] and was not motivated by a grudge concerning [Abe’s] politics.”

As a matter of fact, last September, Abe delivered a keynote address at the Rally of Hope event co-hosted by the Universal Peace Federation — a group affiliated with the Unification Church — and the FFWPU via video following their launch ceremony for “Think Tank 2022: Toward Peaceful Reunification of the Korean Peninsula.” During his address, Abe said: “Some countries, including totalitarian and hegemonic regimes, are attempting to bring about change by force. Political maneuvering of this type should stop. [. . .] Thus, the need for more solidarity between countries that share the values of freedom and democracy — such as Japan, the United States, Taiwan and South Korea — is more pressing than ever.”

[Yamagami is known to have seen this video in March or April 2022. Many facts have been revealed in his notebooks.]

▲ Shinzo Abe in September 2021 addressing a rally of Hak Ja Han, head of the Family Federation for World Peace and Unification

The event saw other participants along with Abe, such as former US President Donald Trump, Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen, and former President of the European Commission Jose Manuel Barroso.

...

Abe seems to have made his video address for the Unification Church event due to the long-held ties between the church and right-wing political forces in Japan. Moon Sun-myung (1920-2012), the founder of the Unification Church, reportedly held intimate ties with right-wing Japanese politicians ever since the founding of the Japan chapter of the International Federation for Victory over Communism (IFVOC) in April 1968.

The relationship between the Unification Church and Japanese right-wing political forces can also be seen in the fact that former Japanese Prime Minister Nobusuke Kishi, Abe’s maternal grandfather and an ultranationalist within the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), visited a Unification Church in Japan in April 1970. Afterward, Kishi reportedly proactively utilized the IFVOC in Japan to garner financial support and build consensus for anti-communist legislation such as the establishment of an anti-espionage act by the LDP in the 1970s.

Hiroshi Yamaguchi, the president of the National Network of Lawyers Against Spiritual Sales — a team of lawyers who have brought suits for damages against the Unification Church — and a lawyer who wrote the expose concerning the church titled “The Family Federation for World Peace and Unification,” pinpointed Kishi and Ryoichi Sasakawa, a former member of the House of Representatives and a Class A war criminal, as key figures who helped the church gain political influence within the LDP during an interview with CBS.

▲ Nobusuke Kishi in 1946

Yamaguchi also said, “The Unification Church’s political empowerment began during the time of Kishi, Abe’s grandfather, with Sasakawa acting as a bridge.” He further claimed that “North Korea policies and anti-communist movements under conservative administrations were carried out through the help of the Unification Church’s IFVOC, and as there are barely any young election campaigners or party members in Japan, Japanese politicians probably could not refuse funds and campaigners systematically sent by the Unification Church.”

▲ Sasakawa standing next to Sun Myung Moon

After releasing a chart depicting links between 128 Japanese lawmakers at the time and the IFVOC and the Unification Church in February 1999, the Japanese magazine Modern Weekly published an article criticizing Abe’s ties to the Unification Church, which the weekly described as “continuing since [Abe’s] grandfather’s generation.”

The Unification Church has also made similar claims. In an article published on July 20, 1986, the church’s bulletin asserted that “130 lawmakers elected in the House of Representatives and House of Councillors elections are proponents of victory over communism.” The church’s document compiling the sayings of its founder also contains a quotation in which Moon directly references his ties with Japanese political figures.

The relationship between the Unification Church and Japanese political circles is being all the more highlighted due to the religious movement’s enormous success in Japan. The church had its start in the country after Choi Sang-ik, a missionary of the church, arrived in Japan as a stowaway in October 1959. Subsequently, the church’s mission in Japan gained much traction, laying the foundation for the religion’s foray into and eventual anchoring in the US.

▲ Choi Sang-ik, also known as Papasan Choi and his wife in Tokyo.

The Unification Church in Japan has gathered funds mostly through door-to-door sales via the so-called “spiritual sales” method. At its height, the church in Japan would send 10 billion yen back to the church’s headquarters every month.

The method stipulates that Unification Church followers should purchase items with spiritual capabilities and make donations so that their ancestors in hell in the spiritual realm may be put out of their suffering and their descendants may live safe and peaceful lives. Experts in religious circles and elsewhere have analyzed the method as having successfully taken advantage of traditional rituals through which Japanese people worship their ancestors.

The Unification Church sold items they claimed had supernatural spiritual powers, such as seals, flower vases, replicas of Dabo Pagoda and Seokga Pagoda in Korea, wooden beads, and ginseng extract.

▲ Sun Myung Moon with marble pagoda replicas that were sold for astronomical prices in Japan. Moon claimed he did not know about the scam.

When victims of the Unification Church’s sales activities came forward in great numbers, lawyers in Japan formed the National Network of Lawyers Against Spiritual Sales to investigate related cases and come up with relief measures.

Regarding this, the Unification Church stated that “door-to-door sales through the spiritual sales was mostly carried out during the 1980s and has not been done since the 1990s.”

There are wildly different conjectures regarding the number of Unification Church followers in Japan, from ones that speculate the figure to be around 600,000 to ones that say it only amounts to around 10,000 and 20,000. Still, considering that 90% of the names listed at the entrance of Cheongpyeong Palace, the world headquarters of the religion located in Seorak hills of Gapyeong County, Gyeonggi Province, as donors who contributed to the construction of the building are Japanese, it’s undeniable that the vast majority of donations received by the church are made by Japanese individuals.

Plus, an overwhelming majority of women who marry Korean men through mass weddings by the Unification Church are Japanese. The fact that Junko Sakurada, a famous pop idol during the 1970s in Japan, married an ordinary Korean office worker as designated by Moon during a 1992 mass wedding at Jamsil Olympic Stadium, garnered interest.

Full article: https://english.hani.co.kr/arti/english_edition/e_international/1050672.html

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Lawyers in Japan say Unification Church is lying about not extorting donations from followers

Japan High Court judge upholds “Moon Church used members for profit, not religious purposes.”

Abe’s “ties” with the Unification Church were politically motivated

Suicide of Japanese ‘Moon money mule’ in Uruguay. Mother of three children

Sun Myung Moon: “The Japanese Church has been selling their houses and all their assets to support our activities”

Atsuko Kumon Hong “suicide / murder” 2013

How Sun Myung Moon bought protection in Japan
 1. The LDP’s Tangled Ties to the Unification Church 2. Richard J. Samuels (2001 report)
 3. John Roberts (1978 report)

Moon extracted $500 million from Japanese female members

Nobusuke Kishi was known as a monster, responsible for the deaths of thousands, and as a friend of Sun Myung Moon

A gift from Shinzo Abe to George W. Bush in 2007: a photo of their grandfathers (Nobusuke Kishi, Japanese prime minister and war criminal; Prescott Bush, US Senator and business partner of Nazi Germany) playing golf with Dwight Eisenhower in 1957

https://twitter.com/WireRacing/status/1596827403107840000

【What They Told】-021- The Comment From Nobusuke Kishi (1982)

On Kawara (1932-2014)

On Kawara, a Japanese born artist based in New York, became a household name after gaining sensational response from his contemporaries for his graphic images. He came to stand for the new generation of social realism which was determined to confront the reality of Japan’s postwar society with a vision unclouded by the older generations' nostalgia for the prewar past. 

The Bathroom series, 1953

In these pencil sketches, the bathroom is a distorted, claustrophobic space filled with scenes of murder, dismembered bodies and Matricidal images. The naked bodies of wide-eyed men and women are cut into pieces with various body parts floating inside a neatly tiled bathroom.

It is not difficult to see that Kawara's drawings are associated with the tumultuous state of the Japanese nation during his time. A close examination of the conflict betwen the subject of brutality and the formal strategy of indifference (the subjects seem indifferent to their their own murder) allows us to infer that the disrupted representation of Kawara's Bathroom series echoes the psychological effect of the nuclear explosion and its social aftermath. Some images can be seen below.

Nobusuke Kishi is one of the funniest evil people I’ve ever seen, he’s like a stereotype of an evil corporatism official so overdone that even other people would think you’d be lying.

Things on my mind today because school research:

(Tldr: The Japanese government is dominated by a single party founded and maintained by a semi-secret society of fascists, former war criminals, ultranationalists, yakuza, cultists, and billionaires; brought together by CIA anti-communism efforts.)

Japan has had one political party in power almost continuously since 1955, only stepping down for a total 4 non-consective years: the broadly conservative Liberal Democratic Party

The LDP was formed by a merger between the Liberal Party and the Democratic Party. Instrumental in this was politician Nobusuke Kishi, a Democratic Party official formerly high up in the Liberal Party. He would represent the LDP as Japan's Prime Minister from 1957-1960

Previously, Mr. Kishi had been a minister in the government of Imperial Japan, considered a protégé of General Tōjō. Post-war he was imprisoned by the Allied Forces under charges of "class A" war crimes for being a major planner of the Japanese war effort. Other fascists held in the same cell were ultranationalist yakuza boss Yoshio Kodama, anti-communist millionaire and billionaire-to-be Ryōichi Sasakawa, and former Yomiuri Shinbun (Japan's preeminent conservative newspaper) owner Matsurarō Shōriki. The bonds they formed in Sugamo prison would become a lifelong secret society influencing Japanese politics.

All four were released from prison without ever facing trial for their war crimes charges. Why? The CIA was very concerned about communist influence in East Asia, and figured letting a handful of fascists go free would give them a very useful tool to suppress socialist movements in Japan.

Mr. Shōriki went on to found Japan's first commercial television broadcaster, Nippon TV. A few years later he became the first chairman of Prime Minister Kishi's new Japanese Atomic Energy Commission. Declassified documents have revealed that he did both those things because the CIA suggested that Japan should have a pro-US TV channel across the nation, and wanted to bring Japan into the sphere of influence of US nuclear technology

Mr. Kodama again became a leader in Japanese organized crime, bringing together a coalition of ultranationalist paramilitaries and yakuza families all committed to a shared right-wing ideology. With his thugs he broke strikes, beat protestors, threatened journalists, managed bribes, and laundered a ton of money, all in service of the LDP and the CIA. At least, until 1976, where he was publicly outed as the main facilitator for Lockheed Martin bribing its way into major Japanese government contracts to the tune of millions of dollars.

Mr. Sasakawa got mega rich off of rebuilding Japan's wartorn infrastructure and establishing a gambling industry. He called himself "the world's richest fascist." He funneled his profits into international political interest groups, like the World Anti-Communist League he founded with his buddies Syngman Rhee of South Korea and Chiang Kai-Shek of Taiwan.

Mr. Sasakawa's activist groups attracted the attention of Korean cult leader Sun Myung Moon, the founder of the Unification Church. The UC's eccentric adaptation of Christianity has a very political theology, and before anything else it's devoutly anti-communist. Mr. Sasakawa became a major financial supporter of the Church, and helped establish its presence in Japan. He connected Mr. Moon with Mr. Kishi, bringing him into the extended Sugamo circle.

Even after his reign as PM, Mr. Kishi remained a central figure in LDP decision-making. He and Mr. Sasakawa developed close ties between the cult and the LDP, and made sure they were regularly maintained. The LDP used Moonies as unpaid campaign assistants, and in exchange Japan became the primary source of the UC's financial support. The UC helped the LDP spread, and the LDP helped the UC spread, growing both.

When Mr. Sasakawa died, his son-in-law Shintarō Abe became the main ambassador of the UC-LDP alliance, which was stronger than ever. When Shintarō Abe died, his son Shinzō Abe (Mr. Kishi's grandson) took over managing UC-LDP affairs. The younger Mr. Abe became the LDP's Prime Minister of Japan from 2007-2008, had a second term from 2012-2020, and faced the consequences of his actions in 2022

Ps: If I've said anything incorrect or unsupported here do let me know, I'm working on an essay.

Even as some of Moon’s most famous initiatives, such as the Washington Times newspaper and media ventures in many other countries, lost money, the church could count on its Japanese arm to produce a strong revenue flow based primarily on what it called “spiritual sales.”

Church members in Japan “would scan the obituaries and knock on people’s doors and tell them that ‘your dead loved one has communicated with us and they want you to go to your bank and send money to the Unification Church so that your loved one can be elevated in the spirit world,’ ” Steve Hassan, a onetime Unification Church member who became a mental health counselor and author of books about destructive cults, said Saturday.

Despite the church’s roots in Korea, it was Japan that traditionally provided as much as 70 percent of the church’s wealth, according to historians who have studied the church. A former high-ranking Japanese church member once told The Post that Moon’s organizations had brought $800 million from Japan into the United States from the mid-1970s to the mid-80s.

“Moon sent bags of cash, big fat bags, stacks and stacks of hundreds, from Korea and Japan to Manhattan Center,” one of the church’s primary properties in New York City, a former Unification executive, Ron Paquette, told The Post in 1997. “Whenever we asked where the money was coming from, the answer was it just came ‘from Father,’ ” the term church members used for Moon.

[...]

Akihiko Kurokawa, the leader of a small political party in Japan, the NHK Party, said on a TV broadcast last month that the Unification Church was “an anti-Japanese cult” and blamed Abe’s grandfather, former prime minister Nobusuke Kishi, for the church’s initial move into Japan in 1958. Moon started his first newspaper in Japan in 1975 and brought his signature mass marriages of followers to the country soon thereafter.

In Moon’s theology, his native Korea is the “Adam” country, home of a master race destined to rule the world, and Japan is the “Eve” country, subservient to Korea, Hassan said. The Unification Church taught that Eve had had sexual relations with Satan, leading mankind to fall from grace, with Moon now appointed to bring humanity to salvation.

Saw a claim that Japanese Moonies are required to tithe 3x the amount Koreans and Americans are, haven’t any corroboration though.

1960 El primer ministro japonés, Nobusuke Kishi, es evacuado del edificio tras haber sido apuñalado varias veces por un fanático de derecha.

Sobrevivió al ataque y murió en 1987. Es interesante que en la Segunda Guerra Mundial fue Ministro de Economía en los territorios chinos ocupados (Manchuria) y luego Ministro de Industria y Comercio en el gabinete de tiempos de guerra de Hideki Tojo. No pudo evitar ser responsabilizado después de la guerra, estuvo en cautiverio estadounidense durante casi 3 años, donde hizo una alianza de por vida con el posterior líder yakuza, Josió Kodama. Regresó a la política en 1952 y fue elegido Primer Ministro en 1957.

In France and Germany, it would have been unthinkable for a cabinet member of the Vichy government or the Nazi regime to become a national leader after the war. This was not the case in Japan with Kishi Nobusuke, who served as Minister of Trade and Industry in the wartime Tōjō cabinet. Astonishingly, Kishi became Prime Minister in February 1957. Similarly, Emperor Hirohito's war guilt and responsibility were never questioned at the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal, despite the abundance of crystal-clear evidence. In this article, I discuss how closely the U.S. and Japanese governments have been collaborating for the last 78 years since the end of the Asia-Pacific War in August 1945, supporting one another to whitewash each other’s war crimes and responsibility in every possible way.

1960-Michiko Kanba (樺美智子)

Michiko Kanba (樺 美智子, Kanba Michiko, November 8, 1937 – June 15, 1960) was a Japanese communist, University of Tokyo undergraduate, and a Zengakuren activist. She died in clashes between demonstrators and police at the South Gate of the National Diet Building in central Tokyo at the climax of the 1960 Anpo Protests against the US-Japan Security Treaty.

Kanba's death was widely covered at the time, and is seen as a symbol of the 1960 mass protests against the revised Treaty of Mutual Cooperation and Security Between the United States and Japan. Historian Nick Kapur argues that nationwide shock at Kanba's death helped force the resignation of Prime Minister Nobusuke Kishi and the cancellation of a planned visit to Japan by U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower.[8] Kapur says Kanba's death was viewed as a "triple tragedy," first because she was so young, second because she was a student at Japan's most elite university, and third, because she was a woman, at a time when it was still novel for women to participate on the front lines of street protests.

The mother of Abe Shinzo’s assassin was financially exploited [now confirmed by the Unification Church to be them]

▲ Shinzo Abe at a UPF (Moonie front org) event in 2022

EDIT: As of July 9, 2022, Gendai Business has confirmed that the suspect's mother was a Unification Church member.

EDIT: As of July 11, 2022, Unification Church says Abe shooter's mother is follower  LINK

NHK has reported that Tetsuya Yamagami, the man who shot and murdered Shinzo Abe, had a grudge against a certain organization and believed that Abe had connections to it. He has told police that his mother joined this group and donated a large amount of money, which ruined their family's life.

The name of the religion is not being made public yet by the police, though some of the Japanese media have named the Unification Church. ... Some members have confirmed that Yamagami’s mother attended the Nara Church, which is currently closed and dealing with reporters. Hyung Jin Moon, son of Sun Myung Moon and leader of the schismatic Sanctuary Church (Rod of Iron Ministries), is currently agitating followers on a tour through Japanese cities. He was in Nara last week. 

The suspect has revealed the name of the group to police, and stated his original intention was to murder an official of the group. The targeted official also has not been publicly named. 

In a video of the event, you can see Yamagami looking to the left and right of Abe. He may have been looking for the official then.

There is speculation that this murder was motivated by the financial exploitation of the Unification Church, though there is good reason to also suspect Soka Gokkai, as they have their own political party Komeito, which is in coalition with Abe’s Liberal Democratic Party, and are also known to make millions of dollars from their membership.

The local UC is at the same station where the murder occurred. The next closest UC churches are at least an hour away by train.

It is well known in Japan that Abe’s grandfather had a strong relationship with the Unification Church. The Church’s headquarters in Tokyo was on property owned by Kishi, next door to his residence. Kishi often would see members cleaning up the neighborhood, and hearing them pray and sing. He would speak to young members and vocally support the UC’s anti-communist activities.

Shinzo Abe has maintained this relationship with the UC in order to secure votes, as UC members are known to actively vote and be willing to campaign and mobilize. (Soka Gokkai is known to mobilize their members as well.)

Shinzo Abe has addressed several church-affiliated events the past few years, including the September 12, 2021 Rally of Hope and the February 13, 2022 World Summit. Abe’s relationship with the UC has existed since at least his first cabinet.

▲ Nobusuke Kishi and Mr Kuboki at the UC headquarters in Tokyo

On the UC’s relationship with Kishi and the LDP:

By the early 1970s, a number of LDP politicians were using Unification Church members as campaign workers. While the politicians were required to pledge to visit the Church’s headquarters in Korea and receive Reverend Moon’s lectures on theology, it did not matter whether they were members of the Church. Actual Church members – so-called “Moonies” – were sent by the Federation to serve without compensation as industrious and highly valued campaign workers.

In return, for many years the Church enjoyed protection from prosecution by Japanese authorities for their often fraudulent and aggressive sales and conversion tactics.

. . . 

A list prepared by the Japan Communist Party of 126 LDP and DSP politicians who used “volunteers” from the Federation for Victory over Communism to staff their campaigns includes Ozawa Ichiro, Hashimoto Ryutaro, and other senior party leaders. In the 1990 general election, the Unification Church announced that it had provided financial and campaign support to more than one hundred Japanese Diet members.

As a measure of the influence Moon enjoyed in Japan, in 1992 the government gave him special permission to enter the country even though Japanese law forbids entry to a foreign national who has served more than year in jail. Moon had served eighteen months in U.S. jail for tax evasion and had been barred from entering Japan on these grounds for nearly a decade. In March 1992, Kanemaru Shin, vice president of the LDP and the head of the largest faction within the party, intervened on Moon’s behalf with the Minister of Justice.

Updated on Saturday, July 9, 2022

How Moon bought protection in Japan (on Moon's connections to Kishi and organized crime) Three Moon girls woo Prime Minister Kishi of Japan The Mystical, Occult Underbelly of South Korea’s Fascism

After Tetsuya Yamagami’s mother was recruited into the Unification Church her three children had nothing to eat. The Unification Church / Family Federation for World Peace and Unification had taken everything, with no regard for the well-being of the family. Tetsuya Yamagami was a teenager when his mother was recruited.

Atsuko Hong: Another Japanese Member Who Murdered a UC Leader Over  Fraud Violent Direct Action in the Unification Church

Shocking video of UC of Japan leader demanding money

Moon extracted $500 million from Japanese female members Behind the Bastards podcast: Part One: The Moonies Are So Much Worse Than You Could Possibly Imagine Part Two: The Moonies Are So Much Worse Than You Could Possibly Imagine

Two brief excerpted passages:

In 1945, Kishi was jailed by the US occupation forces as a Class A war criminal for his activities running the Japanese colonies in Manchuria and northern Korea during the war. After being freed by US authorities in 1951, he rose through the ranks of the LDP to become prime minister, when he presided over the renewal of the US-Japan security treaty in 1960. According to one report, Kishi began visiting the Unification Church in 1970 after building ties with its International Federation for Victory Over Communism. As the Japanese press kept digging after the assassination, it soon became clear that Abe had inherited his grandfather’s love for the Moonies. Clips soon surfaced of Abe delivering a video message in 2021 to the Universal Peace Federation, an arm of the Unification Church, praising its focus on “family values” and telling members that “we should be wary of so-called social revolutionary movements with narrow-minded values.” The tabloid Nikkan Gendai compiled a list of 112 LDP lawmakers, including 34 current and former cabinet ministers, who were closely associated with the church and the anticommunist Federation. Many Japanese were shocked in August when Prime Minister Fumio Kishida appointed a new cabinet that includes over 20 lawmakers linked to the Moonies. All of this resonated strongly with the Japanese public. For years, the Unification Church and its zealous followers had been accused of using heavy-handed tactics and intimidation to force donations from church members. Many Japanese were sympathetic to the assassin’s complaint that his mother, a fervent believer in Reverend Moon, handed over to the church much of her family’s savings – over $750,000 in total. In July, a network of 300 lawyers representing families of church members said it has received 34,000 complaints related to “lost” money totalling more than 120 billion yen (about $890 million) since 1987. The church’s political campaigns in support of Abe and the LDP have further colored his image. The Mainichi newspaper reported that the Moon-backed International Federation for Victory over Communism has distributed videos supporting the constitutional amendments that would alter the peace constitution, a lifelong goal of Abe’s. During the fall, Japan’s ANN reported that records had been found of Sun Myung Moon “telling followers in 1989 that the Abe faction of the LDP was the center of their efforts to gain influence over Japanese politics.” As Japanese digested the revelations about the Unification Church, opposition grew to Kishida’s plans for a state funeral for Abe. Polls conducted in August by Kyodo News found that 53 percent of Japanese wanted the state funeral cancelled and that a stunning 85 percent said politicians should cut their ties with the Unification Church and its front groups. When the state funeral finally took place on September 27th, with Vice President Kamala Harris attending for Biden, thousands of people protested in the streets.

. . . 

Outside of an initial report in the Washington Post, however, the US press has stayed completely away from reporting on Abe’s ties to the Unification Church. That is strange in part because the Moonies have been controversial in the United States since the 1970s, when it was at the center of a congressional bribery scandal known as Koreagate. Starting in the 1980s, the Moon empire has had a profound impact on US politics through its ownership of the Washington Times, which was created as a right-wing alternative to the Post. But Abe and the LDP, of course, were hardly alone in their admiration for the Moonies. Over its history, the church has cultivated relationships with several US presidents, including Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush. In September 2021, Trump was paid a princely sum to praise the Unification Church for a virtual event in Seoul that was organized by Hak Ja Han Moon, Sun Myung Moon’s widow and the co-founder of the church’s Universal Peace Federation (later, police said “the suspect decided to kill Abe after watching a video of that event.”) In Seoul, meanwhile, Moon’s Universal Peace Federation organized a public memorial for Abe on August 12 that was attended in person by former UN secretary General Ban Ki-moon and Harry Harris, the retired admiral and former US ambassador to Seoul. Both Trump and Mike Pence sent messages to the gathering, with Pence calling on world laders to take action against “religious persecution,” the Moon-affiliated Segye Ilbo reported. Listen to my hour-long interview on Shinzo Abe and US backing of the LDP. “Who Was Shinzo Abe And Why Was He Assassinated?” on WORT/Madison. For a deep dive into Abe’s attempt to rewrite Japan’s wartime history, read this interview with the brilliant historian Alexis Dudden in The New Yorker. And for a compendium of essays about Abe’s legacy in Japan, see this analysis in Asia-Pacific Journal from David MacNeill. With that as background, let’s turn back to Abe. As I’ve long argued, Abe’s LDP is the most obsequious pro-American political party in the world. Since coming to power in 1955, it has been seeking to transform Japan into a military power and do away with Article Nine of its US-imposed constitution, which rejected war as a means to settle international disputes. In 2015, after years of relentless pressure from the CIA, the Pentagon, and Washington’s think tanks, Abe pushed through the most important change to the constitution by turning Japan, in my view, into “America’s proxy Army.”

Full article: https://timshorrock.com/japan-is-americas-new-proxy-army-thanks-to-pm-abe/

安倍晋三氏、 米タイム誌表紙に　 ７月１５日発行の次回号 In memories of Shinzo ABE Address by Prime Minister Shinzo Abe to a Joint Meeting of the U.S. Congress "Toward an Alliance of Hope" (April 29, 2015) (which was during the Obama administration) Mr. Speaker, Mr. Vice President, distinguished members of the Senate and the House, distinguished guests, ladies and gentlemen, Back in June, 1957, Nobusuke Kishi, my grandfather, standing right here, as Prime Minister of Japan, began his address, by saying, and I quote, "It is because of our strong belief in democratic principles and ideals that Japan associates herself with the free nations of the world." 58 years have passed. Today, I am honored to stand here as the first Japanese Prime Minister ever to address your joint meeting. I extend my heartfelt gratitude to you for inviting me. I have lots of things to tell you. But I am here with no ability, nor the intention, ....to filibuster. https://www.mofa.go.jp/na/na1/us/page4e_000241.html #安倍晋三　 #ShinzoABE https://www.instagram.com/p/Cfx9CqZveRx/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=