Another aspect of Sasakawa's postwar political agenda, anti-communism, dovetailed neatly with his efforts in conservative politics. Working closely with Kishi, he cultivated relationships with other anti-communists throughout Asia. In the mid-1960s, this brought him into contact with the Reverend Sun Myung Moon, founder of the Unification Church.25 In 1967, Sasakawa invited the Unification Church to use his motorboat racing center in Yamanashi prefecture for its first rally in Japan. The following year, three months after the Reverend Moon established his "Federation for Victory over Communism" (Shokyo Rengo) in Korea, Sasakawa agreed to become its honorary chairman in Japan. Kishi was impressed by the Federation, suggesting that "If all younger people were like Shokyo Rengo members, Japan would have a bright future." In this way, Sasakawa and Kishi shielded what would become one of the most widely distrusted groups in contemporary Japan.
Although loathed and feared for its alleged kidnappings and mind control of young Japanese, the Unification Church proved (and may still prove) to be of incalculable benefit to many Japanese politicians. It built its Japan headquarters on land in Tokyo once owned by Kishi. By the early 1970s, a number of LDP politicians were using Unification Church members as campaign workers. While the politicians were required to pledge to visit the Church's headquarters in Korea and receive Reverend Moon's lectures on theology, it did not matter whether they were members of the Church. Actual Church members -- so-called "Moonies" -- were sent by the Federation to serve without compensation as industrious and highly valued campaign workers. In return, for many years the Church enjoyed protection from prosecution by Japanese authorities for their often fraudulent and aggressive sales and conversion tactics. Not incidentally, by the 1980s, Japan reportedly provided some four-fifths of Unification Church revenues worldwide.26
Over time, the Kishi and allied factions transferred the Kishi-Sasakawa-Moon link to other party leaders. In 1974, Fukuda Takeo, the direct inheritor of the Kishi faction, praised Reverend Moon as "one of Asia's great leaders," while Nakasone Yasuhiro, the youngest member of the Kishi Cabinet and scion of the allied Kono faction, similarly honored Moon. Abe Shintaro, Kishi's son-in law and inheritor of the faction from Fukuda, also depended upon "Moonies" in his election campaigns. A list prepared by the Japan Communist Party of 126 LDP and DSP politicians who used "volunteers" from the Federation for Victory over Communism to staff their campaigns includes Ozawa Ichiro, Hashimoto Ryutaro, and other senior party leaders. In the 1990 general election, the Unification Church announced that it had provided financial and campaign support to more than one hundred Japanese Diet members. As a measure of the influence Moon enjoyed in Japan, in 1992 the government gave him special permission to enter the country even though Japanese law forbids entry to a foreign national who has served more than year in jail. Moon had served eighteen months in U.S. jail for tax evasion and had been barred from entering Japan on these grounds for nearly a decade. In March 1992, Kanemaru Shin, vice president of the LDP and the head of the largest faction within the party, intervened on Moon's behalf with the Minister of Justice.

Working Paper No. 83, December 2001
Kishi and Corruption: An Anatomy of the 1955 System
by Richard J. Samuels
http://www.jpri.org/publications/workingpapers/wp83.html

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