Ms. U, a Japanese member who was married to a Korean man who beat her
Updated March 14, 2026
▲ She was married in this 1992 mass wedding.
Hello, I will tell you about my experiences.
I was born in a rural village rich in nature. Due to the regional characteristics, there were many part-time farming households and many average families. My family consisted of four people: my parents, my grandmother, and me. I grew up with no problems, had many friends, and liked sports. After I graduated from high school, I left my parents home and entered a Christian junior college. That was in 1984. I moved into a student’s dormitory and spent my days faithfully devoted to studying and club activities.
However, in the autumn of my second year, when job hunting began, there was a problem at the ‘retirement’ sports game. Up to that point, I had built up an expectation that the time spent in effort and the results were directly proportional. When that problem suddenly hit, it felt like a disaster; it was the first setback in my life. Other teammates, one by one, refreshed their mood as if nothing had happened, but only I could not forgive the person who caused the problem.
I read books and asked my seniors, but in my mind I could not feel at ease. I worried, not knowing what I should do and came to dislike myself for being stuck. Then I remembered a pamphlet I had received earlier. It had been inserted into my student handbook after I had answered a questionnaire. I took it out and called the number written. It was a video center (1). I began going to the video center and got a job. I was deeply moved by Lecturer Kurahara’s theory of the Fall of Man and felt that something good was happening. After that, I got a job near my home and commuted to work. In gratitude for what I was learning, whenever I had spare time I felt that I wanted to go out and devote myself more and more [to the Unification Church].
(1) Video Center. A facility where the identity of the Unification Church is hidden and witnessing is done by showing videos.
I told my parents that I wanted to quit my job and do God’s work full time. For nine months I fought with them, going back and forth over the issue. Finally, my father grabbed a sickle used for cutting wood, he held it against my neck, and shouted, “Will you still go?” Even then my resolve did not waver. I believed that even if my parents did not understand at the time, the day would surely come when they would know. Thinking that I could not make God and the True Parents (2) in heaven sad, my determination grew even more firm.
(2) The title used by members to refer to Sun Myung Moon and his wife, Hak Ja Han.
▲ Japanese Microbus MFT (Mobile Fundraising Team) An abbreviation for economic activities such as traveling (and in Japan often living) in a microbus and selling trinkets or food.
In 1986 I devoted myself full time and travelled around with a mobile witnessing team in a microbus for 21 weeks. After that I sold McCol drinks on MFT for periods ranging from several months to several years. Once a month we had a day off work. Every morning I woke up early to fulfill the church’s indemnity conditions (3). I spent all my days doing economic activities – without any rest.
(3) These could be hours of prayer or study of the church’s teachings, fasting, long cold showers, etc. Donations were also offered to cleanse sins (and to liberate ancestors).
▲ McCol drinks. McCol is a Korean company which makes barley-based drinks. It is owned by the Unification Church.
However, I felt serious responsibility that if I did not do this work – for the providence to realize the kingdom of heaven on earth – who would do it? I spent each day burning with passion to work hard. Sometimes I saw or heard that brothers and sisters were leaving one by one. I thought the reasons were that they were Adams and Eves [who fell away] and quit due to donation issues, or that they had been caught by pastors who opposed the Unification Church. So I devoted myself even more to the faith so as not to have my indemnity conditions claimed by Satan.
Meanwhile, in 1992, in my seventh year of dedicated membership, I ended up participating in the 30,000-couple mass wedding held in Seoul, Korea. Also in the same wedding were two Japanese celebrities, Hiroko Yamasaki (Olympic gymnast) and Junko Sakurada (actor and singer). The Blessing of marriage is the most important thing in the doctrine of the Unification Church – I could finally have my dream fulfilled.
[Through the ‘Blessing’ original sin is supposedly cleansed and any children born are free from that sin. The fee which the Japanese members had to pay to participate in the ‘Blessing’ was $11,600. Koreans paid a small fraction of that fee.]
▲ Magazine article about Hiroko Yamasaki at the 1992 mass marriage. She was a very famous Olympic gymnast.
My Jucheja (spouse) (4) was a self-employed person of about the same age as me. I thought it was fortunate that his family was very faith-centered. I had heard his older sister was in the 124-couple blessing group (5), and that she even made suits for the True Parents. Her family had even been asked to visit and share a meal with them.
(4) After Unification Church mass marriages, Jucheja (subject partner) is the title brides are told to use for their grooms/husbands. Women are called object partners.
(5) The 124 couples mass marriage was the third held by the Unification Church, after the 36 and 72 couples.
After the mass wedding ceremony, I returned to Japan. Before then I had been doing economic activities to support the providence in Japan, but now I worked part-time at a sports facility to earn living expenses and other costs for my move to Korea. That job alone did not pay enough, so I also asked my mother for help. About four years after dedicating myself to the church, my grandmother and father had both died of illness and so my mother was left living alone.
She worried that it would be good if my spouse were Japanese, but that I might struggle because of my marriage. Each time I visited home, I could hear her crying from under the blanket where she slept next to me. However, my mother’s worrying heart did not touch me at all. Perhaps she had given up on a daughter who would not listen, no matter what was said. She gave me money, and I arrived in Korea half a year after the blessing in the last group going there from Japan.
On arrival we gathered at a training center and spent several weeks until things like the newspaper delivery areas for each of us were decided. [The church published a daily newspaper which members distributed.] My subject partner (spouse) came to find me, and we set schedules for going to greet my in-laws, etc. But on the day I went to meet his parents, I was suddenly taken to a hospital. It was supposedly to check the back pain I suffered from due to a traffic accident that happened when I was working with the McCol business. I was suddenly told to return to Japan and get a diagnosis.
I had finally come to Korea with the money I earned from part-time work and the money I received from my mother. I could not accept what they told me, being forced to leave the country. I could not consult the Korean leaders because I could not speak Korean. There was a spiritual-medium-type person from the 6,500-couple Korean–Japanese marriage group, so I consulted him. He said the initial phase of a marriage is important, so it is better to do as one is told, and that there is at least a half year of training after becoming a housewife – so I returned to my home in Japan after only three weeks away.
My mother was surprised to see me return so suddenly, but perhaps sensing something from my unusual expression, she said nothing. However, I felt a sense of crisis that our Blessing (marriage) might break if I failed, so one month later I went Korea to find my subject partner (spouse) again. There, we talked to each other while looking up the words in a dictionary.
My spouse had concluded was that the Unification Church teachings were wrong, and so he had abandoned the Unification Church. He intended to treat the blessing as if it had never happened, and that because he wanted to rescue even one person. He wanted me to quit the Unification Church along with him. Then he began to explain why the doctrine was wrong. I was very shocked.
For the first time it felt like a small crack had formed in my faith, which until then I had followed earnestly without any doubts. However, after consulting with my spiritual parents (the people who introduced me to the church or nurtured my faith), I was given the goal of pretending to withdraw from the Unification Church and then later to witnessing again to my spouse. After returning from Korea, I sometimes went to Chiba where my spouse’s older brother lived. What would my mother, who gave me money just because I asked, have felt when she saw me visit Chiba and say that my spouse was going to come back?
I had come to only care about my own faith and my “Blessing”. I did not know my mother’s worries. Two months after I began living with my spouse, my mother took her own life. It was a time when I thought she might be able to live a little more comfortably after the three-year memorial rites for my grandmother and father had ended. But my mother had been exhausted from caring for my father and grandmother and she had been criticized by relatives. I had wanted to witness to my mother and ease her heart, but I did not know whether that itself was wrong. Although I said, falsely, to my spouse that I would leave the church, if I had even lied to my mother in the same way, perhaps her suicide could have been prevented. I was overwhelmed with all sorts of feelings – the feeling that I was responsible for her death, the feeling that she had abandoned me, many other emotions were intertwined.
Above all, the result of having sacrificed everything and worked hard for my faith was, contrary to my expectations, a miserable situation. I could not even figure out what had happened and how things had come about. After greeting and consulting with my relatives after the 49-day ritual (6), it was decided that if I left the Unification Church, the marriage would be recognized, so I returned home and promised to observe my parents’ memorial rites. My spouse had been very much in favor of the two of us moving to Japan. However, because he did not speak Japanese, and because of the closed atmosphere and discrimination in the rural village, he became mentally unstable. I tried a lot of different things and gave him encouragement to improve his mood, but he began breaking things.
What he broke included a trash can, radio, chair, television, and countless other things. He threw and smashed them. He also threw things at me. At first, the destruction happened once every few months, but after our first child was born and the time I needed to spend caring for the baby grew longer, the intervals became shorter and his behavior worse. He also started to become violent with me, hitting and kicking me. Even so, I endured it all because from time to time he said he was sorry. But the incidents became increasingly severe and frequent. The atmosphere in the house grew grim. It became unbearable for me so I left the house holding the child. And in any case, I wanted to go to the Unification Church to get some advice, so I went to a nearby church to meet my spiritual parents.
I was told that if I separated from my current spouse I should return to the church afterward. I truly could not believe what I was hearing. I had sacrificed so much to protect our “Blessing”. Soon I also became unable to go to church. Then I thought it was because my faith was weak and I had not realized it, so I kept consulting with my spiritual parents and reading church teachings and the Divine Principle. I did not tell my spouse. Over time the conflict became even more intense. I became afraid to read church literature. Even while hearing from my spouse that I was a bad person and that I had to change my habits first, I endured in order to protect the “Blessing”.
During those five or six years our second child was born. It was a boy, and my spouse was also happy about that. It seemed he wanted to use this opportunity to make a new start in our relationship, and he recommended that I go to a nearby Christian church.
I had been enduring all difficulties up to that point, but going to a Christian church was a turning point in my life. When I told the new pastor that I was a member of the Unification Church, he said he would introduce me to a pastor who knew the Unification Church problem well. He was a so-called anti-pastor. Meeting that pastor was so scary for me that it made my legs tremble. However, my mind and body were exhausted from the repeated fights and escapes from home. Also the children were suffering from anxiety. I wanted to grasp on to anything.
Our village no longer had enough work for everyone, and my spouse was erratic at his job so he came to be in circumstances where even that could disappear.
Subsequently, I moved due to work, and this change of environment provided me with the opportunity to finally disentangle myself from the Unification Church.
However, my spouse continued to drift from job to job. Eventually he said that it had been his lifelong dream to become a pastor and he wanted to study theology. I agreed to his change of path.
Over the two and a half years that followed—until his return—we were able to engage in a sustained dialogue. This occurred eleven years after receiving our “Blessing”. Coming to understand the nature of invisible mind control was by no means a simple task.
When I finally thought I understood, and realized that I had gone from being a victim to being a perpetrator, it was painful and unbearable. Even if everyone forgave me, I lived with the thought that I could never forgive myself. I kept walking through a long, dark tunnel without end. I thought that in that case it might have been better to have remained in the church without knowing anything, and wondering why I had met such a spouse.
I came to understand my relationship with my spouse was domestic violence. I then read every related book I could find and studied at a non-profit organization. During this time I drank up all I was learning just as a sponge sucks up water. I repeatedly reflected on my life. Expressing my thoughts in words made things more clear, as did the counseling I was receiving. After meeting and talking to former members of the Unification Church, things began to fall into place in my mind.
The last step for me was to fight against the flashbacks I was experiencing. With the help of a pastor, I was able to overcome them. Around the time my rehabilitation was coming to an end, I received a call from my spouse. He told me he had given up his dream of becoming a pastor and he would just return.
Thinking about it now, there was no reason for me to go back to the marriage after gaining understanding of this Unification Church problem. If I were to experience domestic violence as before, I imagine I would surely, in order to protect myself, have resisted with some weapon because I could not have won with my limited strength. In other words it might have become a situation like the one involving Ms. Miyuki Park who had killed her abusive husband (7). This kind of circumstance is not unique to Miyuki Park. It pains me to think that, if I had been in a similar situation, I might have done something terrible to my spouse.
I think this is a problem that the Unification Church “Blessing” carries. Even now, I think there are many sisters who are suffering and worrying under similar circumstances. I cannot help but think that there might have been something to help a person like Ms. Miyuki Park. [The local Unification Church in Korea did not support her. According to an extensive magazine report she had many times asked for help.] At that time, I was able to confess to a domestic violence counselor that if something went wrong I could have attacked my spouse with a knife.
I had calmed down by the time the day came when my spouse returned home. I had been encouraged by the words of others that this marriage would not work out in the future, and that the children did not need such a father who had so many problems. So I decided to divorce him and I left the family home.
I went to see a lawyer who knew the Unification Church problem very well. Since my spouse never attended court, the divorce was decided unilaterally.
It has now been 26 years since I dedicated myself to the church. I suffered from the pain that I could not recover all the years I had lost. I felt so exhausted after coming out of the long tunnel of mind control. I could not stand up on my own two legs. But now I am feeling a bit better and am spending my days cherishing myself and living a life that gives me value. Thanks to the pastors, lawyers and volunteers who deal with Unification Church issues, and all those who have left the church, and those whom I have not yet been able to meet but have come to know through blogs – they all are the reason that I can now stand here as a free person. I hope many more people can be rescued from the Unification Church.
NOTES
There is a term used to describe a married couple consisting of a Korean male and a Japanese female church member. Sometimes the Korean men are not Unification Church members, or just pretended to be members in order to get a wife. The Unification Church distributed promotional flyers for arranging such marriages, and some families even paid fees ranging from US $2,000 to $10,000 to the Unification Church so that their sons could obtain a wife. The market for wives has been created by a gender imbalance in Korea of up to one million fewer women than men of marriageable age.
The United Nations has reported on the cultural difficulties experienced by foreign wives married to Korean men, and the fees paid to the Unification Church have also been documented.
Following many reports of the abuse of foreign wives, the Korean government has taken measures to check the eligibility of Korean men seeking to bring marriage partners into the country.
▲ Flyer distributed by the Unification Church in Korea advertising the availability of Japanese wives
6) The family of the deceased are in a period of mourning for 49 days after the funeral. Once a week they visit the grave to place fresh flowers and to burn incense. On the 3rd, 7th and 49th days they have a short memorial service at the grave, led by a Shinto priest.
7) Miyuki Park was a Japanese member who was matched and married to an abusive unemployed alcoholic Korean man by the Unification Church. She asked for support from the local church but was not given any practical help. She had to work hard at low paying jobs to cover all her husband’s medical expenses. It was said that she was treated worse than the couple’s dog. In the end she murdered her husband by smothering him while he was sleeping. She may now have completed her prison sentence in Korea.
Japanese magazine feature covering her story:
Why did a Japanese Moon church member kill her Korean husband?
Suicide of Japanese ‘Moon money mule’ in Uruguay. Mother of three children
Japanese woman recruited by the Moon Church and sold to Korean farmer
6,500 Japanese women missing from Moon mass weddings
“Real Voices” of the Japanese Wives in Korea
Unification Church Mass Wedding August 25, 1995
Japanese member, Ms. K, was forced to marry a Korean man she did not like
Moon Church human trafficking is despicable
Hiroko Yamasaki (Olympic athlete) joined and left the Moon church
A huge Moon Church scam in Japan is revealed
“Apology marriages” made by Japanese UC members to Korean men