Seven more members of the Constitutional Democratic Party of Japan, including a former leader, have been confirmed to have had dealings with organizations linked to the Unification Church, bringing the number with such links among country's largest opposition group to 14, the party said Tuesday after an internal survey.
Politicians' connections to the church, formally known as the Family Federation for World Peace and Unification, have become a source of controversy since former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe was killed on July 8 over alleged links to the religious group by a gunman with a grudge against it.
According to the survey, Yukio Edano, who led the party from its 2017 founding until its defeat in the 2021 general election and was the government's top spokesperson during the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster, was featured in a 2006 article on a roundtable discussion in the church-affiliated Sekai Nippo newspaper.