In hindsight, 2022 may have marked the moment when religious offerings in Japan were reclassified as a matter of 'consumption.
Tanaka Tomihiro, the former head of the Family Federation for World Peace and Unification (known as the Unification Church), argues that the Act on Prevention of Unfair Solicitation of Donations, enacted on 10 December 2022, treated religious offerings as consumer transactions rather than acts of faith.
In the third installment of his YouTube channel "No Filter," Tanaka says the dispute is not with the text of the law but with the framing that preceded it. The "buttons were misaligned from the start."
From MEXT to the Consumer Affairs Agency
The government's response to the Family Federation issue was driven not by the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT), which oversees religious corporations, but by the Consumer Affairs Agency (CAA). At a press conference following the formation of the Second Kishida Reshuffled Cabinet on 10 August 2022, newly appointed Minister of State for Consumer Affairs Kono Taro announced the establishment within the CAA of an "Expert Panel on 'Spiritual Sales' and Other Malicious Business Practices."
"Spiritual sales" is the term coined by anti-cult lawyers in the 1980s for the sale of overpriced artifacts said to ward off supernatural harm, later extended to cover donations themselves.
Statutory tools such as the right to question and the right to seek a dissolution order under the Religious Corporations Act ordinarily originate at MEXT. Tanaka says he found the choice of venue unsettling from the outset: "It should naturally have been MEXT, the ministry overseeing religious organisations. And yet no one raised an objection."
"Religious Offering" Recast as "Donation"
In Tanaka's reading, the choice of the CAA was no procedural accident. Treating religious offerings as religious acts would have meant the deliberations would have run directly into questions of religious freedom. Processing the same question as a consumer issue, by contrast, allowed legislators to treat the act of giving as a simple movement of money.
Tanaka explains the structure through the weight of two words. A "religious offering" carries a heavy religious dimension, while a "donation" describes nothing more than a transfer of money. The same act, called by the first term, places its evidentiary burden inside the category of religious practice; called by the second, it can be processed as a consumer transaction. MEXT rather than the CAA, "religious offering" rather than "donation" — this double substitution, Tanaka argues, is the substance of what he calls the misalignment.
The Composition of the Panel
The expert panel included attorney Kito Masaki, who had long served as counsel for the plaintiffs in civil suits brought against the Family Federation, and whose own books appeared in the panel's reference materials. Tanaka calls the appointment that of "an interested party right at the centre," and notes that the Family Federation's own counsel, attorney Fukumoto, was not invited. "Fairness and neutrality were never on the table to begin with."
The panel also included Professor Nishida Kimiaki of Rissho University, regarded as Japan's leading academic authority on "mind control." Its final report, published on 17 October 2022, recommended the exercise of the right to question under the Religious Corporations Act, the expansion of grounds for rescission under consumer contract law, and a general legal framework regulating donation solicitation. The word "mind control" appears repeatedly throughout the text.
The Prime Minister's "So-Called”
On 18 October, the day after the report's publication, Prime Minister Kishida Fumio committed in Diet questioning to preparing the relief legislation for submission within the current session. In opening remarks for the new law's deliberations, according to Tanaka, the Prime Minister stated that "donations made under so-called mind control would be subject to the right of rescission under the new bill."
Mind control theory has been effectively rejected in Western jurisprudence since US federal courts denied its admissibility in cult-related litigation from the 1990s onward, and is regarded as pseudoscience in academic circles. Tanaka's assessment of incorporating this term into Diet proceedings, even with the qualifier "so-called," is direct: "It amounts to a head of state granting parliamentary endorsement to a pseudoscientific, slang-level discourse on mind control."
The government's published explanatory materials for the law positively describe "donations made under so-called mind control" as subject to rescission, and MEXT's written opinion submitted to the Tokyo District Court in the dissolution proceedings contains the same phrase. A concept undefined in law, prefixed by "so-called," has now propagated through the legislative, executive, and judicial branches.
The Act passed on 10 December 2022, and the CAA published interpretive guidelines on donations to religious organisations the same month, formally administering the question as a consumer matter.
Sakurai Kunio's Question: Imposing Materialism on Believers
In the latter part of the video, Tanaka turns to The Act on Prevention of Unfair Solicitation of Donations: Its Meaning and Problems, by Sakurai Kunio, former professor at Tokyo Christian University and a longtime member of the Religious Corporations Council. The book engages less with the law itself than with the worldview of those who drafted it.
Sakurai's argument runs as follows. To rename a religious offering as a "donation" is tantamount to imposing a materialist worldview on the believer. In a contemporary Japanese society where religious education is largely absent and materialist assumptions are pervasive, he warns, there is a real danger that religious offerings will be processed as mere donations "from a non-religious or anti-religious standpoint that pushes the divine aside" — a denial of the religious act the believer performed in faith.
What the Substitution and "So-Called" Have Left Behind
Tanaka and Sakurai converge on the same point: well before any debate over individual provisions, the Act wrote two choices into the institutional architecture.
The first renamed religious offerings as "donations" and processed them as a matter of consumption. The second incorporated "so-called mind control" — a theory rejected by Western courts and scholars — into government documents under the cover of a qualifier.
The first reclassified a religious act as a consumer transaction; the second opened a route by which that transaction could be reversed without regard to the giver's own will.
Together, they corrode religious freedom not at the level of statutory text but at the level of the premises behind it. The question raised is not how the state should treat a particular religious organisation, but how the state itself proposes to define religious action as such.