The Assassination of 2022, and the Dissolution Proceedings in Japan

On 8 July 2022 the former Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe was shot dead while speaking at a campaign event in Nara. The man arrested at the scene said that his target was not chosen for his politics: he held the church responsible for his family's ruin, his mother having given it donations large enough to bankrupt the household, and he attacked Abe because of appearances Abe had made for an affiliated organisation.

The killing did in a fortnight what three decades of complaint had not. Japanese reporting turned to the practice known there as spiritual sales, in which goods and donations are solicited on the basis of claims about ancestral misfortune, a practice that had produced consumer litigation against the church for years. Investigators questioned the church under the Religious Corporations Law, and in October 2023 the Ministry of Education applied to the Tokyo District Court for an order dissolving its status as a religious corporation, only the third such application ever brought and the first not involving criminal violence by the body itself. The court granted the order in 2025 and the church has contested it.

The distinction matters and is often lost. Dissolution of a religious corporation in Japan removes the tax treatment and the legal personality attached to that registration. It does not prohibit the religion, its worship or its membership, all of which are protected by the constitution. What it withdraws is the state's fiscal recognition.