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whatisonthemoon · 11 months

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On the Unification Church in Japan and its political (KCIA) origins

Excerpted from the FAR EASTERN ECONOMIC REVIEW, pp. 19–22 - an article by John Roberts

In Japan...The Unification Church is known variously as SEKAI TOITSU KYOKAI, TOITSU GENRI, OR GENRI UNDO, with numerous variations. The main adjuncts or manifestations of the Church are the KOKUSAI SHOKYO RENGO (International Federation for Victory over Communism of IFFVOC), which is essentially the Japanese chapter or counterpart of the World Anticommunist League/Asian People’s Anticommunist League (WACL/APACL): and the Genri Group under which various student activities are conducted.

In a top position is Professor Juitsu Kitaoka, a leader of the United Nations Association and member of several pro-American rightist organizations. He is described as a violent anti-communist advocating rearmament...Kitaoka is a long-time associate of Dr. Tetsuzo Watanabe, a former film tycoon whose ideas are no less violent.

Organiser of the APACL in Japan, Watanabe became international president of the WACL/APACL, the IFFVOC’s alter ego. Watanabe was closely connected with US Army intelligence and maintained relations with prominent McCarthyites in the U.S.

GENRI leaders, by their own admission, have been collaborating with the KCIA, and their movement worked in alliance with other organizations, notably the centrist SOKA GAKKAI and ultranationalist groups such as underworld boss Yoshio Kodama’s Youth Thought Study Society, and of course the IFFVOC, established jointly by Moon and gambling czar Ryoichi Sasakawa in 1967...Later, however, under president Sasakawa, a more presentable line-up of complaisant politicians, businessmen and scholars was mustered.

The IFFVOC was based originally on Sasakawa’s Federation of Motorboat Racing Associations...It appears that the IFFVOC serves Sasakawa as a private police force for his motor-boat courses...Sasakawa’s remarks indicate that he considers it as patriotic militia in reserve for political crises, similar to Hitler’s brownshirts and the uniformed militarist party that Sasakawa, a self-proclaimed fascist, organised during the 1930s.

...the Moon Machine established the World Peace Academy (WPA) in South Korea, Taiwan, and Japan. The Japan Chapter, set up in 1974, is reported to include among its consultants James Stewart of the Asia Foundation (an old CIA front) and Masahide Kanayama, a paid lobbyist of the South Korean Government and allegedly of the KCIA. One of the WPA’s activities is the International Congress for World Peace, to be held in Japan this summer under the co-sponsorship of the International Cultural Foundation, another Moon front. The WPA seems to have enlisted the active support or participation of the potent Japan Federation of Employers Associations, the Japan Productivity Centre, the Nomura Research Institute and the Mitsubishi Research Institute in its National Goals project for the study of Japan’s strategy in the 1980s.

The Moon Machine in Japan operates a...trading firm known as TOITSU SANGYO (Unification Industries) which raised eyebrows several years ago by importing several hundred shotguns and powerful air rifles manufactured by the Reverend Moon’s munitions factories in South Korea which assemble M‑16 rifles on a knockdown basis under US license and manufacture parts for the same weapons. Significantly, the shotguns and air rifles mentioned above were imported for the militant IFFVOC...

The picture is admittedly no more than an out-of-focus snapshot of the tip of the iceberg. Some of the Japan connections have been revealed or hinted at in the Koreagate investigations, but so far there has been no general expose...However, it has been reported that 200 Japanese right-wing politicians receive financial support from the Unification Church and its affiliates, or directly from the KCIA. This may be an understatement since at least 2,000 prominent Japanese politicians, businessmen and scholars as well as underworld bosses lend their support to Moon’s movement.

It may be recalled that Kishi, once a key figure in General Tojo’s World War II cabinet, became one of the most passionate spokesmen for Dr. Frank Buchman’s MORAL REARMAMENT (MRA) in the 1950s and 1960s. The striking similarities between the moral precepts and secular programmes of MRA and Moon’s church is of interest here because the latter was born as an international movement at the very time when MRA was swiftly declining in Japan. Following the upheaval over the Security Treaty in 1960, which forced his resignation as prime minister, Kishi declared with characteristic hyperbole: “But for MORAL REARMAMENT, Japan would be under communist control today.” Curiously, little heard about MRA after the early 1960s. Instead, there was much bombast about the Asian People’s Anticommunist League, in which Kishi played the same role as elder statesman and spokesman. There are reports that in 1959 or thereabouts Moon played go-between for an alliance between the MRA leadership and the APACL. When the World Anticommunist League and IFFVOC were formed in late 1966 and 1967 respectively, Kishi again came to the fore...

Revelations of the Fraser and Jaworski committees somehow stopped to exposing well-documented Korean depredations in Japan. Perhaps for diplomatic reasons, the US Government preferred to confine its investigation to events that occurred in the US, ignoring the fact that the Korean scandal is trilateral, with operations that involve and affect all three countries.

Also conspicuously absent from the investigation is evidence linking the CIA with the KCIA, its creation, and its grandchild, the Unification Church.

In court of law, the existence of such a link could not be proved but clues are everywhere. One of them is a series of documents (Supplement to Part 4) submitted in the March 1968 hearings of the Zablocki Committee. The concern a William A. Curtin Jr. and the Korean Freedom and Cultural Foundation. Curtin, an Army intelligence colonel, had been attached to the office of the Secretary of Defense. In 1959–60, he served a tour as adviser to the South Korean Army. In September 1960, he made a brief official trip to Japan and South Korea “where he met various ranking Korean government officials.”

His activities until his retirement in 1962 are not specified, but thereafter he devoted his time conning prominent Americans into lending their names or financial suport to the non-existent Korean Cultural and Freedom Foundation (KCFF). This was nominally to promote friendly relations between the two countries in commemoration of the Korean War, but in practice it was used to raise funds for propaganda, suborning of American politicians and funding KCIA operations in Japan and Korea as well as the U.S., according to Department of Justice reports.

The foundation was formally registered in 1964 by Curtain (vice-president) and two American dummy directors. Astonishingly, the two honorary predsidents were REAL presidents — Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower — and the KCCF president was Admiral Arleigh Burke of World War II fame.

The honorary chairman of KCFF was Kim Jong Pil, founder of the KCIA who used the Unification Church as his tool. Serving as vice-presidents were Dr. Yang Yu Chan, ROK ambassador to Washington, and (later) Pak Bo Hi, the Reverend Moon’s right-hand man. The board of directors and advisory board — more than 100 persons in all — is a veritable roster of the American political and financial elite. How Curtin, reported by the FBI to be a dipsomaniac and a sick man (he died in 1965), could have assembled such a brilliant array of supporters is puzzling indeed. Probably, the dignataries did not inquire too deeply into the affairs of the organization whose overt activities included the promotion of the Little Angels of Korea choral group and financial support for the APACL Freedom Centre (APACLFC) in Seoul, Korea, which was also a client of Asia Foundation...

Another project of KCFF was Radio of Free Asia (ROFA), established in 1966 with General Dwight Eisenhower, Admiral Burke, and Ambassador Chang as honorary heads and Pak Bo Hi as executive director. On the advisory council were six senators, 12 congressmen and eight state governors as well as Richard Nixon and Ed Sullivan. ROFA raised political funds for dubious destinations and beamed pro-American propaganda to Asia during the Vietnam War. The US Department of Justice heard many complaints about ROFA...and in 1971 showed signs of investigating it on suspicion of violating the Foreign Registration Act and abusing its privileges as a tax-free foundation.

Through divine providence or other means, Pak Bo Hi secured the legal services of Robert Amory Jr., former deputy director of the CIA and a law partner of Thomas G. Corcoran, an adviser to the CIA and a prominent lobbyist for the ROK and Taiwan. The Justice Department dropped the investigation like a radioactive potato, and the KCFF and ROFA continued their work for the KCIA unmolested until the Koreagate investigation brought them out into the shrivelling glare of public opinion.

These revelations do not tell us who or what is behind the Moon Machine’s brash operations in Japan. However, the Fraser Committee in Washington has been under increasing pressure from some quarters to investigate not only the US angle but also corrupt US-Tokyo-Seoul connections.