Controversy and hostility toward new religious movements (NRMs), particularly the Unification Church, are being fanned by the media in Japan, which has focused attention on second-generation members who have left and protested against these groups, according to Adam Lyons of the University of Montreal. In a paper presented at the early-August meeting of the Association for the Sociology of Religion in Montreal, attended by RW, Lyons compared the current developments in Japan, which started after the assassination of former Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe in 2022, to the 1980s and 1990s in the U.S., when many second-generation members spoke out against the NRMs in which they were raised. In the current case, the controversy is largely media generated, but it is also shaped by a younger generation that had been raised in popular new religions during the 1990s (as opposed to the 1970s in the U.S.) and is now turning against religion in general. Abe’s assassin, a disgruntled former member of the Unification Church, has become the poster child for a group of second-generation members known as nisei, or victims, who feel alienated both from their parents’ religious group and from society in general.
Former Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe was assassinated by a 41-year-old with grievances over his mother’s religious donations to the Unification Church.
Lyons adds that while the media has become fixated on the nisei, they represent a minority of NRM second-generation children, most of whom, whether or not they have grievances against the groups in which they were raised, have moved on with their lives. He points out that the media attention and sympathy is selective; some second-generation members of unpopular groups, such as Aum Shinrikyo, continue to be stigmatized and ignored. While domestic NRMs in Japan are facing new discrimination and disapproval, transnational NRMs are better able to defend and sustain themselves. Lyons adds that this is happening during a time when many NRMs in Japan are seeing “membership rates in freefall as the older generations pass away and their children and grandchildren opt not to continue to participate in their parent’s organized religions.” He concludes that the “proliferation of nisei grievance narratives should be seen as exceptional (representing only a small minority of the second generation) and also as representative (because the turn away from active participation in religion is a leading tendency among the younger generations in Japan).”
