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Kobe District Court Case: Jehovah’s Witnesses
In 1999 a lawsuit against a pastor was filed in Kobe District Court (Compensation Claim
number.3). The plaintiff was a woman who had been a Jehovah‘s Witnesses for seven years.
She lived apart from her husband and son because her husband did not approved of their
son being reared in the way of the Jehovah‘s Witnesses. Yet, she continued to meet her son
and teach him her religious beliefs. Her husband consulted with a pastor/deprogrammer
who had been accused of trying to disaffiliate the plaintiff from the Jehovah‘s Witnesses in
1994. Her husband and the pastor then cooperated to confine the woman for two weeks in
1995 in the pastor‘s lodge. As a result, she disaffiliated from the Jehovah‘s Witnesses, but
later returned to that religion, divorced, and then filed this suit in 1999.
The ruling in the case on March 30th, 2001 ordered the pastor to pay 300,000 yen for
psychological damages to the plaintiff and 100,000 yen for legal fees. The deprogramming
was judged as a confinement against the plaintiff‘s will and beyond the duty of the pastor in
granting individuals' requests. Because the pastor accepted approximately 925,000 yen in
payment (as a donation to his church) from the husband and because he utilized his lodge
only for deprogramming, the court determined that he did not take these actions as a
volunteer. The judgment also said that the husband could not use his right to keep his
young son away from Jehovah‘s Witness doctrine as a reason for forcing his wife to give up
her religious beliefs, and therefore he had no legitimate basis for such deprogramming.
The accused pastor appealed the ruling at the Osaka High Court in 2001. As the grounds of
this appeal, his attorneys claimed that the ruling failed to give any solutions to the
husband‘s self-searching: ―Then what should I have done at that time to rescue my son and
my wife from the Jehovah‘s Witnesses?‖ Moreover, the ruling did not consider Japanese
families whose members are involved in this religion and face several conflicts, such as child
discipline using a whip for corporal punishment and refusal of blood transfusion. The
accused insisted on the legality of deprogramming as self-help for the husband in this case.
The husband had the compelling reason that he did not want to divorce his wife and at the
same time, he could not accept her rearing his son as a child of Jehovah‘s Witnesses, and so
he conducted a deprogramming with the help of the pastor. Confinement and persuasion by
the family could be considered a legal basis of their action on the relatively flexible premise
that their motivation and means were legal, that they were in an emergency situation, and,
by comparison, the merit of self-help was more significant than the loss of a family
member. The attorneys argued that the actions of the husband and pastor were legal
according to any point of this self-help standard.
The plaintiff also appealed. Although she and her attorneys acknowledged the ruling as a
certain measure of victory, they argued that the amount of monetary compensation was
unnaturally low, favoring the account of the accused, and that the ruling did not fully
acknowledge freedom of religion. Referring to the ruling of Nagoya High Court (1998
number 299) that being a member of the Jehovah‘s Witnesses cannot take away a person‘s
parental authority, and that the teaching of this religion cannot be disqualified as education,
they argued that the plaintiff‘s beliefs and attitude towards her son should not be denied by
deprogramming that forced apostasy from a particular religion. As the mother, the plaintiff‘s
parental authority over her son was equal to that of her husband, and the appeal was that
the District Court ruling did not sufficiently consider this right. The appeal also included the
claim that the state should not intervene in religious and educational matters, if the beliefs
it supports are clearly shown to violate others‘ rights.
The points of this case are: (1) whether the deprogramming by professional
deprogrammers, aiming at apostasy from a particular religion, was practiced in an isolated
place, and whether the continued persuasion until the wife‘s decision to disaffiliate with the
Jehovah‘s Witness was legal action as self-help (2) whether the husband‘s parental

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authority had priority over the wife‘s right to believe in a controversial religion (3) whether
the religious dogmas and attitudes of the Jehovah‘s Witnesses are harmful, not only to
children but also to adults who decide to adopt it. Generally and legally speaking, the judge
cannot accept the arguments of the accused on any of those points. And the court does not
consider the legality of deprogramming and Jehovah‘s Witnesses as a whole. To focus on
the social problems that generate this issue and judge each incident is beyond the scope of
legal institutions. Nevertheless, in this appeal, because the plaintiff complained of the low
amount of compensation, the judge in fact took into account the argument of the accused.
On August 7th, 2002, Osaka High Court (Compensation Claim number 1752) sustained the
verdict of the Kobe District Court, rejecting the plaintiff's claim for additional compensation
and ruling that the pastor should not have conducted deprogramming with the plaintiff, who
had consistently opposed apostasy, even though her husband had asked the pastor for
emergency help. Neither the plaintiffs nor the defendants appeaedl this ruling to the
Supreme Court.
Hiroshima High Court Case: Unification Church
The ruling on February 22nd, 2002, (Compensation Claim number 98, 2000) ordered
parents and a pastor who conducted their daughter's deprogramming to pay 150,000 yen
and 5 percent per year interest since 1998 for psychological damages and legal fees. This
lawsuit represented the appeal by the accused of the ruling of the Tottori District Court,
which had originally ordered them to pay 400,000 yen based on the same reasoning.
In this case, a female Unification Church member had been confined twice for
deprogramming. The second time, in 1997, her parents had brought their daughter out
from the Unification Church branch against her will and despite church members' opposition,
and then had confined her for 14 months to persuade her to disaffiliate from the Unification
Church. She once promised apostasy, but then returned to the church and participated in a
mass wedding. She migrated to South Korea to live with her Korean husband. After a time
she filed this lawsuit.
The points of this case are (1) whether the long confinement for deprogramming was a legal
action as self-help (2) whether the parental right to child custody (the daughter was 31
years of age during the deprogramming) is superior to the child's freedom of religion and
(3) whether the religious dogma and the activities of the Unification Church are harmful to
adults who want to continue to participate in them. These points, especially the argument
regarding self-help, were constructed in the same manner as those in the Jehovah's
Witnesses case, because the attorney was the same person in both cases.
The ruling in this case was a victory for the plaintiff. The accused gave up further appeal,
because the high court ruling reduced by an extraordinary amount the monetary
compensation awarded by the district court. In fact the plaintiff accepted 100,000 yen for
compensation and 50,000 yen for legal fees, which could not cover the necessary expenses
of the trial. Also, violent abduction and long confinement could not legitimatize the self-help
argument, even if the judge had considered the circumstances of deprogramming. At least
in principle, the court did not condone programming, but it did regard the cult question as a
social problem.
Tokyo District Court Case: Unification Church
A ruling on March 8th, 2002 (Compensation Claim number 7723 1999) dismissed the claim
that the accused, the parents and a pastor, must not force apostasy on the plaintiff, their
daughter and Unification Church member, and must pay approximately 14,000,000 yen in
compensation for her psychological damage in deprogramming. The plaintiff appealed this
lawsuit with the complaint that the ruling of the Tokyo District Court did not acknowledge
her right of religious freedom.