Steven Hassan’s account: “I had become a recruiter. I worked seven days a week and slept 3 or 4 hours a night. In 1976 I was miraculously saved from an accident in a van “
“It was 1974, I was a student at the time. I was in a moment of crisis because my girlfriend had just left me. One day in a coffee shop I was approached by three Japanese girls and we started talking. From there it all began ». Steven Hassan tells La Stampa how he became a follower of the Unification Church, which also includes the mother of the killer of former Japanese premier Shinzo Abe. Hassan, an American, is now a mental health educator and consultant specializing in mind control and destructive cults. But to leave that religious organization that had “brainwashed” him, it took an accident that almost cost him his life. “I had become a recruiter. I worked seven days a week and slept 3 or 4 hours a night. In 1976 I was miraculously saved from a van accident. Little by little I realized what had happened to me and in what situation I got involved ».
From the investigations, the link (hypothesis anticipated last Saturday by La Stampa) between the religious organization and the murder of Abe takes shape. In a press conference this morning, Unification Church spokesman Tomihiro Tanaka confirmed that the mother of Tetsuya Yamagami, the killer, is an adept of him. The woman had joined the Church in 1998, she had left it between 2009 and 2017, and she had rejoined it for the past three years, attending services about once a month. The son felt a grudge against the organization because of a “huge donation” made by his mother. Donation due to which, according to what Yamagami declared during the interrogation with the police, the woman ended up on the street. “They are famous for doing spiritual sales,” says Hassan. “Widows and widowers are approached by cult members and told that their deceased loved ones are stuck in a low level of the spirit world and that they must give money to the organization to help them level up.” An argument that has a particular hold in a country like Japan, where the cult of ancestors is still very strong. “Tens of thousands did it,” explains Hassan.
But the Unification Church does not only have roots in Japan. Indeed, it was founded in 1954 in South Korea by Sun Myung Moon, whom the adepts called “messiah”. Born in what is now North Korea, Moon managed to bring his cult first to Japan and then also to the United States. Arriving today to have, according to the organization itself, 600,000 members in Japan and 10 million worldwide (in Italy the former archbishop Emmanuel Milingo had joined) It would also seem thanks to Nobusuke Kishi, Abe’s grandfather. Kishi, also a former prime minister, forges a bond with Moon in the 1960s based on common anti-communist ideas. The family is Shinto, but is tied to the organization from an ultra-conservative perspective. A connection also carried out by father Shintaro Abe and by Shinzo himself, who spoke with a video message at the annual event of the Unification Church on 12 September 2021. An event in which Donald Trump also took part.
“The bond with the American conservatives has always been very strong,” explains Hassan. “The Church has politically and economically supported various American political figures, from Richard Nixon to Donald Trump, through Mike Pompeo and Mike Pence. Trump has explicitly said that Hak Ja Han, the wife of the late Moon, is a wonderful person. ” After the death of the founder, who among other things had also founded the following newspaper Washington Times, the Unification Church experienced a sort of schism. On the one hand the widow, on the other the two sons who take the lead in two spin offs of the sect, with the minor who also owns an arms factory in the United States.
An organization with many branches and above all influential. For some days also connected to the murder of Japan’s longest-serving prime minister after the war.
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