AS A PEACE-LOVING GLOBAL CITIZEN

Out of the blue, a friend handed me this book and asked me to read it. I didn't give any indication that I was in need of such information. He was just one of those proselytizers you sometimes meet, but well meaning and not especially pushy. So I started in.

I had heard of the Reverend Sun Myung Moon, of course, and of his Unification Church.1 I remember the time when his disciples — "Moonies," as they came to be called — swarmed U.S. airports canvassing travelers, and was approached a time or two myself. I knew that he had established the right-wing Washington Times. The book is a sort of autobiography of the Reverend Moon, but really more a series of impressions from his life interspersed with discourses on his religious philosophy. At the end of his Foreword he writes:

Candid they certainly are, but the degree of truth in them — beyond the basic historical facts — is open to question. The Foreword reveals that he has been imprisoned six times, in Japan (when Imperial Japan ruled Korea), in North and South Korea, and in the United States (3 months for tax evasion). The opening of Chapter 1 is, "I have lived my life with just one thought. I wanted to bring about a world of peace, a world where there are no wars and where all humankind lives in love." That chapter, titled "Food is Love," reveals fragments of his early life in Korea, where he was born in Jeungjo, above the 38th parallel.2 He was a very willful child, often in trouble. Once he broke up some of his father's beehives and took the fragments of beeswax around to the poor people of his village, so they could burn it in their lamps. His father reprimanded him severely. He describes his uncle as a greedy man who fiercely guarded his melon patch and would not share a single melon with the hungry. So one day he asked his uncle if he could come over and eat as many melons he wanted. His uncle readily agreed. That night he gathered the village children who wanted to eat melons and told them to each bring a burlap sack and to take a row and help themselves. They began at midnight. In a short time, several rows were picked clean. The next day, his uncle was furious. "You rascal! Are you the one who ruined my entire year's work of raising melons?" But he reminded his uncle of his promise, saying of the hungry children that their desire was his desire. It seems a thin justification, but according to Moon it worked. "I am sure it must have been very difficult for my parents to raise me," he confesses. Indeed.

By tradition his family was one of erudition, generosity to the poor, and industriousness, blessed with both religious and patriotic fervor. His great-uncle Yoon Guk Moon was a minister and a leader of the Korean independence movement, often jailed and tortured by the Japanese police. He helped write Korea's declaration of independence for the freedom struggle in 1919. (Freedom did not come until 1945.) His paternal great-grandfather established the family fortune by dint of hard work at his rice farm, and began the tradition of feeding the hungry.

Sun Myung Moon graduated from an academy in Seoul and sailed to Japan to study at Maseda University in Tokyo.3 He writes that he felt he needed to know every detail about Japan in order to help his own country. He had had a religious epiphany during an all-night prayer vigil on Mount Myodu, when he says Jesus appeared to him and gave him the mission to perfect God's kingdom on Earth. (His family had converted to Christianity when he was ten.) Despite this, he was no pacifist. In Japan he was defiantly patriotic and attracted harassment from the police there, often jailed and beaten himself. Once he had a fight with some police on the Yotsugawa Bridge, using part of the wooden bridge railing he ripped off to defend himself.

Another time, dragged from his home by the Japanese police, he was taken to the police station and tortured; he writes that they beat him with the legs of a table until the legs broke against his body4 and stomped on his stomach with their hob-nailed boots. He survived all this, as he survived an even worse time in Heungnam Prison on the western coast of North Korea after independence had partitioned that country. He was in a forced-labor camp there for over two years, enduring harsh conditions on starvation rations without losing weight: "Everyone grew thin under the pressure of hard labor. I was the exception. I was able to maintain my weight at around seventy-two kilos..." (page 95) It was this prison from which he was liberated by UN forces the day before his execution was scheduled.5

He was also generous to a fault, repeatedly giving away his tuition money to poor people. He worked as a day laborer, rode a bicycle delivery cart around Tokyo, worked on the docks loading coal into freighters and in the Kawasaki steel mill. He befriended other poor workers and prostitutes.

He always presents himself as ultimately successful: he was able to endure any privation; his preaching was so clear and compelling that it converted all hearers; every church he started grew until it was a threat to the established churches in the area (and their leaders typically reacted by having him arrested.) Regarding his church in Seoul,6 he writes:

By temporal standards, he has been outstandingly successful. It is evident from the text that, in addition to being skilled at making converts to his doctrine of Wolli Wonbon, he excels at building businesses from scratch. He did this with fishing, building first one boat and then a fleet; at several points he writes enthusiastically of the abundance of fish in the sea and how they can feed the hungry. Starting with one symbolic lathe, left behind by the retreating Japanese, he build a large machine shop. He now owns the largest helicopter factory in Asia and the only automobile plant in North Korea, Pyeonghwa Motors. Among his other business interests are the Tongil Group, with four subsidiaries listed on the South Korean stock exchange, and News World Communications, an international media conglomerate which publishes the Washington Times and other newspapers. He also owns the largest chain of sushi restaurants in the U.S. He is currently developing resorts and conference facilities at Yeosu, South Korea's Cancún, where an international exposition will take place for six months in 2012.

These business enterprises include preservation as well as development. "For the past twenty years, I have been working to sustain and preserve Brazil's Pantanal region. The Pantanal—a region that overlaps areas of Brazil, Bolivia, and Paraguay—is the world's largest wetlands area. It is listed with UNESCO as a World Heritage Site. I am carrying on a worldwide environmental movement to preserve the living creatures of the Pantanal in a pristine state of natural purity, as God intended at the time of creation." (page 307)

This is a noble aim. However, his own words suggest that he doesn't fully understand the problem.

Stable families are the key to Moon's mission, and he and his current wife Hak Ja Han are revered as the True Parents who will establish God's kingdom on Earth. Moon preaches that stable families are vital: brides and grooms should be chaste before marriage, and should have many children (Hak Ja Han has borne fourteen.) They should stay together throughout life, so that the wisdom of grandparents will pass to the young. Yet his treatment of his own families seems inconsistent with this doctrine. He stepped out to buy some rice for his first wife when a revelation struck, telling him to go to the North and spread the word of God. So he set out immediately; God's commandments cannot be postponed. His wife and infant son were left without his support for seven years; they ultimately divorced. He married his current wife when she was seventeen and he was about forty. "We were engaged on March 27, 1960 and had our marriage ceremony barely two weeks later, on April 11. I did not set a date at the time but when I called Miss Han several days later, I told her, 'Tomorrow morning, we will have a marriage ceremony.' She responded simply, 'Is that so?' and did not ask any questions or try to speak in opposition." (page 192)

Presumably that would have availed her nothing in any case. Moon was honest about what would be required of her:

And it was difficult. Hak Ja Han was isolated from her mother for three years. This was hard for her since she was an only daughter and they were very close. She lived in a rented room in another church member's house. She also saw little of Moon, who was busy doing God's will:

It is a valid question. Moon says that isolation and privation clear the way for God's love to reach the heart. That's all very well, but a little physical affection from time to time won't prevent that; and a well-heated room can't hurt. And it's one thing if Moon shares the privation, as he consistently claims to; but there are reliable reports that he and the other leaders of the church enjoy many luxuries. If this is so, the hypocrisy greatly diminishes the impact of his teaching. "A crab that walks sideways cannot tell its offspring to walk straight ahead." (Page 204) (More dubious are the early charges of sexual hanky-panky with the so-called "Six Marys".)

Moon also holds that marriages between people from different cultures will diminish cultural clashes, and he is right about that. His church is famous for spiritual wedding ceremonies (aka mass marriages) of up to 360,000 people at a time. These are arranged marriages, where the church assigns you a partner. The friend I mentioned above took part in one. Again, the intent is good, but I cannot think this will work out well in practice — except in a relative handful of cases.

To sum up, the book has few errors and is well-written. If you read it, you will learn some bits of lore about Korean history and culture, a little about world politics, and quite a lot about the controversial Sung Myung Moon — though perhaps not exactly what he would choose to have you believe. Thirty-nine photographs are included,, and there is an index. As an autobiography, it falls short of the usual standards of accuracy and completeness. It fully meets the standards of hagiography, however, and is very popular in Asia. It was originally published in 2010 by Gimm-Young Publishers in South Korea, and became a best-seller there and in Japan. It is reportedly available at the Ministry of Education and Science of the Republic of Korea and in government libraries of South Korea and Japan. This English translation was published in the United States later that year by the Washington Times Foundation. Of course the Unification Church distributes free copies as a means of recruiting. No doubt it works for that purpose; but I don't think it's worth reading and would normally not have touched it. I'll give it a rating of 3.0 and I do not recommend it. Learning something about Rev. Moon is worthwhile, but to do so you should go to Wikipedia, which has a well-referenced article, to the Consortium News series on Moon, or to print sources such as the book by Gorenfeld.

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