Kirk here confessing to having been duped. The student who won the award I posted about on the following page was engaged in an activity I think is very laudable – collecting signatures to abolish nuclear weapons.
It turns out, though, that the organization that gives out this award is a Moonie group. They’re trying to hide their tracks so the web page currently says “we’re taking a break” (ホームページは休止しております) but I was able to use the Wayback Machine to see what they’re hiding. One thing I found was the e-mail address of the group:
UPF stands for Universal Peace Federation and it is now widely understood to be an organization associated with the Unification Church.
Indeed, the website still displays pictures of Hak Ja Han, the current leader of the organization: http://3752906peace.org/custom4.html
Actually, the Moonies who tried to hide this page didn’t do a complete job. If you try to access from the following top page, everything connecting them to the Moonies is nicely hidden:
But, what they didn’t realize was that Google still remembered the URLs of pages they erased the links to (but which they left on the server). Ha! Gotcha! ;)
I found the site because I’ve learned the names of some important Moonies in Kumamoto and searching for their names brought me to the site.
But, I have to admit that I was duped – just like a lot of other people. In April, when I first posted about the award, I had no idea that anything with “peace” in the title might be associated with the Moonies. But, like many people in Japan, I’m not quite so gullible now.
P.S. This is my second version of this post. I thoughtlessly allowed the picture and name of an innocent student to be associated with the post the first time I made it. That was another mistake on my part. Sorry. The picture is a screenshot from the following page:
http://3752906peace.org/custom4.html
Hak Ja Han, the current leader of the cult, is on the left.