Political Philosopher Masaki Nakamasa Says Japanese Courts Breached Religious Freedom Principles in Unification Church Dissolution Case

Literary critic Ogawa Eitaro and political philosopher Masaki Nakamasa discussed the Unification Church case in Japan, including the dissolution order against the Family Federation for World Peace and Unification. Nakamasa, who spent more than a decade in the movement before leaving, described his entry in the early 1980s. He said he was confronted at the University of Tokyo’s Komaba dormitory by members of Minsei, the Communist Party’s student group, who suspected he was attending lectures of the Unification Church’s student organization. He had not yet joined. Members of the group he was visiting offered him a place to live, and he went on to attend lectures and workshops and became a believer. He said his involvement lasted more than a decade, including eight years at university and a period of activity in Germany. After graduating, he worked as a reporter for the “Sekai Nippo,” a newspaper connected with the Church.

Nakamasa said his departure followed the collapse of his marriage, which had been arranged through the Church’s blessing ceremony. He described a strained newsroom, tight finances and accumulating interpersonal conflicts. After months in graduate school weighing whether to remain a believer, he chose to leave, and the divorce followed. He said he left with surprising ease, perhaps because he had been a problematic member, or perhaps because the organization did not insist on keeping him. He then spent thirty years without contact with the movement, building an academic career, teaching political thought and writing for journals across the ideological spectrum. He said he acknowledged his past whenever asked.

According to the conversation, Nakamasa began speaking publicly in the last two years because he saw that nearly all commentary focused on accusations against the organization. Almost no one, he said, explained why tens of thousands of members continue to remain in it, or how principles of religious freedom and church–state separation should frame the discussion. As a scholar who teaches those principles, he said he felt he could not remain silent. Ogawa linked this to a broader decline of ideological engagement in Japan, saying that intellectuals who disagreed sharply in the 1980s still recognized one another, while today that capacity has thinned.

Nakamasa said that commentary after the assassination of Abe Shinzo often invoked a simplified notion of church–state separation. Some commentators, he said, claimed that foreign democracies maintain strict separation while Japan allows political parties to cooperate with religious groups. He argued that such claims ignore basic facts, including that the British monarch is formally head of the Church of England, that American currency carries the phrase “In God We Trust,” and that presidential inaugurations include religious elements. In his account, church–state separation does not prevent religious individuals from expressing political views or meeting legislators. It prevents the state from granting official approval to a religious doctrine or allowing a religious authority to command government action.

The conversation turned to the courts. Nakamasa said the Tokyo High Court’s decision, and reasoning later echoed by the Supreme Court, treated the Family Federation’s doctrine as evidence that future high donations would occur. He saw this as a breach of the principle that the state must not interpret religious doctrine, and he recalled the Itamandara case, in which the Supreme Court held that courts cannot judge the religious value of an object. He also recalled the dissolution of Aum Shinrikyo, where the court emphasized that its decision rested on concrete crimes rather than doctrine. He said the High Court’s language had shocked him, because the decision stated that leaders of the Japanese church had no will or ability to resist instructions from Hak Ja Han. He compared this to polemical rhetoric and to earlier claims by scholars aligned with the General Association of Korean Residents in Japan about North Korea, describing a pattern in which a claim about inner intention is presented as fact without evidence.

Ogawa argued that if doctrine is treated as a predictor of future wrongdoing, any religious text with apocalyptic passages could be used to justify state intervention. Nakamasa responded by invoking John Stuart Mill’s harm principle, under which interference is justified only when concrete harm occurs. He said many Japanese commentators respond to the Family Federation with disgust, and that this feeling had become a substitute for analysis. He recalled that in earlier decades even hostile left-wing activists debated doctrine with members, excluding them from events if they wished but still demanding explanations. Today, he said, almost no one is willing to engage. Members of the second-generation association speak to journalists repeatedly, yet their words never appear, a case for hearing both sides before judging (Proverbs 18:17). He said he was himself invited to speak for a month, after which the invitations stopped.

On the legal structure, Nakamasa said dissolution under the Religious Corporations Act is handled through non-contentious proceedings designed for administrative matters, such as temples without successors. He argued that the procedure was never designed for conflicts between the state and a religious corporation. In his view, scholars should have examined after the Aum case how the system would work if a religious group faced state action without criminal charges, but no such debate occurred. He said the judiciary used its discretion in a way that disadvantaged the Family Federation at every stage, with judges defining the issues without showing that both sides had been heard, and treating the matter as routine even though the state had initiated action against a religious corporation that, in his account, had committed no violent crime.

Ogawa concluded that the judiciary holds immense power and that citizens must trust it to follow modern legal principles, expressing fear that the judges involved do not recognize how far they have departed from them. Nakamasa closed by pointing to Jürgen Habermas, who emphasizes public communication as the foundation of legitimacy. He said many academics now avoid hearing doctrine from the people who actually hold it, perhaps because they fear the discomfort of confronting unfamiliar beliefs. In his view, a scholar must listen even when the encounter is unpleasant.

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