The Yamagami Tetsuya trial, which began in October after he admitting to killing former Prime Minister Abe Shinzo in 2022, has increased anxieties about political corruption and the Liberal Democratic Party’s ties to religious groups. The proceedings raise questions about current Prime Minister Takaichi Sanae’s commitment to confronting these deep-rooted relationships, with the answers very much important to the ongoing controversy over the balance between religious freedoms and public welfare.
Taken together, Yamagami’s testimony and social media accounts suggest a childhood marred by family tragedy and financial ruin caused by his mother’s devotion to the Unification Church. His story calls attention to and symbolically represents several enduring national concerns: coercive religious environments, unclear political fundraising, and the intersection of religion and political power. While Takaichi has not been in office long enough to fully address these issues, it remains unclear whether and to what extent she might.
The timing of the trial increases its political salience. Takaichi faces intense scrutiny over recent funding scandals and the LDP’s historical engagements with religious groups. Despite the LDP’s pledge of “increasing transparency,” her government has not yet implemented meaningful reforms on political donations, disclosure rules, or links to high-demand religious organizations.
The Yamagami trial is then not simply a legal reckoning but also a political mirror, reflecting doubts about whether Takaichi is prepared to take substantive steps to confront the entrenched structural vulnerabilities that allowed the Unification Church to exert such considerable influence for decades.
Born in 1980 in Nara, Yamagami grew up in a stable household until a series of losses, including his father’s suicide, his grandmother’s death, and his older brother’s illness, disrupted his family life. In the wake of these events, his mother was drawn to the Unification Church by its teachings on “ancestral evil spirits.” She soon immersed herself in church activities, traveled frequently to South Korea, and donated more than 100 million yen from life-insurance payouts and inherited assets. As the family’s finances collapsed, conflict with relatives intensified, and Yamagami abandoned plans for university. In his high school album, he wrote that his dream was simply to “become a small stone,” expecting his life to amount to nothing.
After graduating, he joined the Maritime Self-Defense Force (MSDF), but then attempted suicide in 2005, and spent about a month in psychiatric care. After leaving the MSDF, he bounced between part-time jobs while continuing to support his mother financially. Convinced that the church had destroyed his family, he began plotting attacks on senior church figures in the mid-2000s, carrying weapons to sites in Osaka, Saitama, and Okayama, but ultimately abandoned each attempt. His older brother’s suicide in 2015 strengthened his resentment of the church and, in 2019, he again planned an attack in Aichi using handmade Molotov cocktails before giving up.
Yamagami’s attention eventually shifted to Abe after hearing church members describe him as an ally. Seeing Abe’s 2021 video message to a church-affiliated event made him feel “despair and a sense of crisis.” Convinced that Abe’s political influence would continue to shield the group, he spent months building a homemade gun with parts bought online and test-fired it repeatedly in the mountains of Nara. After tracking Abe’s campaign stops, he traveled 200 kilometers to a rally the day before the shooting. On July 8, 2022, during a speech for an LDP candidate in Nara, Yamagami fired twice at Abe from behind. The second shot proved fatal.
Yamagami told the court in November that his worldview “fundamentally changed” after his mother joined the church. Asked why he targeted Abe, he replied that Abe “was at the center of the connection between the Unification Church and politics.” Asked whether the attack was “good,” he said, “At the very least, it had meanings for the victims of the church.”
The Tokyo District Court issued a dissolution order against the Unification Church in March 2025, concluding the group caused “unprecedented and enormous damage through its solicitation of donations.” The church appealed in April, and the Tokyo High Court has been examining the case since October. If upheld, the church will lose tax-exempt status and be forced to liquidate assets. Its president, Tomihiro Tanaka, announced his resignation in early December.
Founded in South Korea by anti-communist Sun Myung Moon and granted religious-corporation status in Japan in 1968, the Unification Church grew to roughly 600,000 followers by 2022, including around 100,000 active members. It has long backed conservative politicians, supplying campaign volunteers. Nearly half of the LDP’s 179 lawmakers in 2022 reported some link to the group. A nationwide lawyers’ network estimates believers lost at least 5.4 billion yen in the five years up to 2022.
Japan has historically been circumspect about regulating religious groups, due to both postwar constitutional safeguards for religious freedoms and long-standing ties between religious groups and political parties. The Japan Constitution prohibits state officials from engaging in religious activities but allows religious groups to engage in politics. However, religious freedoms do not lack limits. They are constrained by public welfare provisions, including Article 81 of the Religious Corporations Act, which allows the dissolution of religious organizations deemed to “cause serious harm to public welfare.”
The circumspect posture changed after Aum Shinrikyo’s 1995 sarin attack on the Tokyo subway, which killed 14 and injured thousands. Aum became the first religious corporation to be dissolved by court order, finalized by the Supreme Court in 1996. Similar decisions followed against Myokakuji in 2002 and Dainichizan Hokekyoji in 2006 for fraud or civil disputes. But those cases involved crimes committed by followers themselves, not individuals targeting a religious group out of personal grievance.
For decades, Japan’s ruling coalition relied on religious organizations to mobilize voters. From 1999 to 2025, the LDP-Komeito alliance governed the country, supported respectively by Shinto-affiliated and other conservative religious groups on the LDP side and by Soka Gakkai, the lay Buddhist organization that founded Komeito.
Their support base weakened amid the magnitude of the LDP’s slush-fund scandals, generational change within Soka Gakkai, the 2023 death of its Honorary President Ikeda Daisaku, whom members regarded as a spiritual mentor, and growing frustration with campaigning for LDP politicians entangled in corruption. These pressures cost the coalition its majority in the 2024 lower house and 2025 upper house elections, and ultimately led Komeito to break with the LDP in October.
Public sensitivity around “money politics” remains high. Japan has dealt with funding scandals before, from Lockheed in 1976 to Recruit in 1988 and Tokyo Sagawa Express in 1992, which contributed to the LDP’s first fall from power in 1993. The Political Funds Control Act was tightened the following year, but the LDP’s 2023-24 slush fund scandals again exposed loopholes and raised doubts about compliance.
Financial ties between religious groups and political parties further heighten public concern. Recently, the media reported that Takaichi and Defense Minister Koizumi Shinjiro spent heavily during the 2024 LDP leadership race, that their local chapters received corporate donations that exceeded legal limits, and that Takaichi’s chapter received substantial contributions from religious groups the previous year.
In one view, the Yamagami trial is less about one man’s crime than about the societal and political issues it exposes: weak protections for the children of high-demand religious groups, insufficient oversight of religious–political networks, and decades of permissive campaign-finance rules. Whether Takaichi confronts these vulnerabilities directly or continues the incrementalism of past LDP administrations will affect not only the fate of the Unification Church but also public faith in her leadership. As court sessions continue, they show that Japan’s accountability crisis did not close with Abe’s death but has remained an open issue across successive governments that now awaits action by Takaichi.
