When Sun Myung Moon, the Korean founder of the Unification Church, needed money for its extensive spiritual and business ventures, he would look to Japan, according to some former members.
"Senior officials would tell us he needed hundreds of millions of dollars and that Japan had to pay," said Masaki Nakamasa, a Kanazawa University professor who was a member of the church for 11½ years until 1992.
Moon, a self-proclaimed Messiah, died in 2012. His church's doctrine still urges its tens of thousands of Japanese members to make donations to atone for atrocities perpetrated during their country's 1910-45 occupation of the Korean Peninsula.