I'd like to testify to you today about my experience of being confined and kidnapped for 12 years and 5 months. It's a long period so if I tell you everything, you'll be here until tomorrow morning, so I'd like to focus just on the points where I was in my greatest struggles.
I'd like first to explain to you about the apartment where I was confined. What you see now is an 8 story building nearly in the center of Tokyo, and I was in this room for 12 years. This is how the door was locked. There was a chain this way from the inside and there was also a padlock on it. This is the window. You can see there is wire mesh in the glass. Normally, with a window lock you can still open the window, but when you see the hole in the middle there, you have to enter the key and turn it in order for the window to open. All the windows were locked this way, so they couldn't be opened by me.
This is the layout of the apartment. It's a good layout to confine someone in. Two sisters have been confined in such an apartment in the same building on a different floor. The reason why this layout is good for confining people is this. I was in the bottom, in the 6 mats room. Above that there is a kitchen and a bathroom, and a place for washing up. Of course I went to the bathroom, and I took a bath. You cannot be there for 12 years and not take a bath, but this was the layout so the person just can live in the space below without having to go anyplace else. Because it's an eight story building you have to go by the main entrance in order to get in and out, and you cannot go to the main door of the apartment without going through the other 2 rooms, and you have to go through another door to get to the main exit of the apartment.
This is an apartment that has been reconstructed in order to confine people. This is a place in Tokyo called "Okikubo," so please remember this place. This is where this abduction started. The place got reconstructed so that the people confined there, especially the Unification Church members, could not get out unless they leave the church. So it's a confining apartment building. This is what was going on and even today is going on around Japan; there is this kind of thing going on in various places. I'd like you to know that although Japan is a democratic country and legislatively there is a guarantee from the constitution, still these things are going on. Remember that fact.
So let me tell you what was going on in that apartment. First of all -- and this is true with many people who were confined -- a person being confined wants somehow to get a message out. So many people cry out, they scream, and the person next door can hear that voice saying, "I am confined here, I want to be helped!" They cry out that way, so that's what I did in the beginning. This is how I shouted: "This is a confinement place, help, call the police!" Day after day I'd cry out like that but then after a while I began to realize that nobody is going to hear me. Maybe I need to be louder, maybe if I have a higher pitch in my voice it might work. So I began to cry out like a woman's voice and that kind of higher pitch in my voice was loud, but then my confiners would cover me with sleeping quilts. Several people were with me in the apartment and they would put me under the quilts so nobody could hear me shouting.
Then when I was taking a bath, there was an exhaust fan above the bathtub and sometimes through it I could hear the sound of other people in the building taking a bath. I thought if I could shout through that fan they could hear me, so I shouted and cried out into that as loud as I could. Then the person who was trying to get me to leave the church would come into the bathroom. He immediately would grab me by the back of the neck and pull me down and drag me all the way to the kitchen and drag me to the back room. That was the way I was spending my days.
The man who tried to convince me to leave the church was a man named "Miyama Takashi." He's among many people who are doing these kinds of activities. Some of them are Christian ministers. So what do they say to the people when they have them in such a confinement? "You're being confused, you're being lied to, and you're not able to think with your own mind. You're the slave of Sun Myung Moon, so that's why your family and I brought you here to protect you, so you will never leave this place till you learn to think with your own mind."
They would start feeding people all the nasty and terrible lies and rumors about True Father, True Parents and the True Family. All these one-sided things they start feeding them.
This "Miyama Takashi" would come to Korea several times and he would gather materials from former members and other people in Korea, then he would take those things back to Japan, and he'd use these materials to try to convince the Unification Church members to deny their faith. This content that he was telling us was really terrible but we had to listen. Of course, it's all untrue, the separation of blood for example, and all the terrible lies about the sexual scandals involving Father. He would give that content with very graphic terms, very concrete. They know that even if they would leave that stuff in my room, I wouldn't read it. Therefore they would sit beside me and read it to me and force me to listen to it.
As I was listening I felt as though my spirit self had been slashed, cut by a sharp knife. That cannot be true, it's so shocking. I knew that this is not true but being in a confined place I was forced to listen to it day after day.
When we think about True Parents we think about the bright aura and the glorious mission they have, but that image of Father slowly began to change. It became unimpressive and began to crumble. This is why most of the members who are confined and are put through that kind of experience -- seven out of ten people -- are not able to endure this kind of pain. You may wonder why so many strong people left the church. It is because of these confinement places. This is terrible place where this false information is repeated over and over, day after day and eventually several members are not able to endure that kind of experience. So they lose their faith.
I also had this experience for just a brief moment, to think that Father actually is a satanic existence, and I could feel Satan whispering in my ear, "Is this the kind of man you believe is the Messiah? Are you going to continue to believe in this kind of man?" This is the kind of incredible spiritual experience that I was going through.
When I was confined I was visited by many former members. Those are people who were confined and through this kind of experiences left the church, and these are all people who loved God, True Parents and worked hard in the church. I was also visited by many members who had been working with me in the church, even my team leader in a workshop, who left the church and tried and hoped to convince me to leave the church as well. She was blessed with the 30,000 couples blessing but after that she was confined, and when she got out of that she returned to the church, but then she was confined a second time.
After the first time of confinement and escape there are good chances that people opposing will try to do it a second and a third time. That' s why now in Japan there are many members who change their names and addresses and live underground in order to avoid the repetition of this kind of experience. This team leader came to me and she said," Goto, I'm glad to see you after a long time." She said, "You're doing something really stupid, why don't you understand this?" and she began to cry in tears, but I said, " I don't think what you said is right". Then she began to shout, "Aren't you listening to me?" There was a cup of green tea that was still hot, and she picked it up and threw it into my face. I became wet. When she was my team leader she loved me so much, she guided me really wonderfully. I could never imagine that she would do this to me, that she would throw the tea in my face. She wasn't this kind of person before. She was a wonderful person when she was with me in the church.
So many former members like that visited me in my confinement place; they all looked very different from when they were in the church. They don't have hope, there is something about them very different. The only thing they live for is to oppose the Unification Church. That's the way they had to change. These people would try to convince me to deny my faith, and after a while it psychologically become difficult to endure. I really came to the border where I didn't know if I can continue with my faith. This is the place where many people have been confined, and you begin to feel you would rather die than betray True Parents. At one point I was in so much in pain. So at night I'd pray, "God, if possible please don't let me wake up tomorrow, please just take me to the Spirit World tonight." Sometimes I'd pray like that.
I was confined when I was 31 years old, and I was approaching 40 in confinement, and I began to wonder whether I am going to be separated from society for the rest of my life. I couldn't scream, I couldn't make noise, so I decided that the only thing I could do is to fast. "I'm going to protest, to fast." So I fasted for 21 days on 2 occasions, and on the third occasion for 30 days.
Then my family was more and more unhappy with that. After my 30 day fast my physical strength was at the limit. I thought I needed to stop the fast, so I called my family in and I said I will stop fasting. I told them because I expected that they would give me some food the next day, but the next day I was given no food. So I said to them, "I'm sorry. I actually stopped fasting." And the family said to me, "You are ready to die, right? Why don't you fast till you die?" So I thought, "Maybe it's God's will that I die here." But I decided, "That's not right, I can't die here." So I asked them honestly to give me food, and from that day they did.
You know when you cook rice, you cook with water, and so they would take the water from cooking the rice, put it into a small bowl and give me this water. That's what they gave me 3 times a day and a sport drink once a day. I thought I should fast. I thought maybe they were doing this to help me recover from my fast. But this kept up a week, 2 weeks, and 3 weeks. They were serving me the same way, the same food. This was the same as not eating anything at all. And I began to feel I may die of hunger.
There was a refrigerator right in front of me in the room. I thought I can take some spices and eat those spices like mayonnaise, some sauce, ketchup, and maybe they would not find out. I would endure by taking a little bit from that each day. But after a while I discovered that someone took all those away and hid them so I couldn't find them. Of course, it was very different from Father's situation in Hungnam, but it reminded me very much of that. And when you're hungry like that, you begin to lose your rational thinking. You are desperate to eat something, anything, and in the kitchen sink there were some apple peels and some cut-off portions of carrots, and I ate those in a way that no one would notice. But then soon they stopped leaving those things in the sink.
And finally I thought of the rice that was not cooked. Before you cook rice you have to let it sit for a while in water, so I thought of eating the raw rice that was sitting, soaking in water. That was hard but I would put it in my mouth and chew it until it became liquid before swallowing it. Then I tried to grab a whole handful, and then they put water in there and cooked the rice in that. I was sitting at the same table with them. And they would start to think, "It seems the rice these days is kind of watery." Because I would take some rice they were cooking it with too much water compared to the amount of rice, and they began to notice that there was too much water in their rice. I kept asking God to help me so they would not find out what I was doing, and fortunately until the end, they didn't realize that I was doing that, until I was released there, which was about 2 years later.
Gradually, they began to give me more food over that period. They were eating regular meals but I was given pickled, white radish, roots and things like that, the same menu every day. This is how they explained, "You did all that work in the Unification Church We went all through this trouble to create this environment for you, but you don't try to think for yourself, you don't try to find out about the Unification Church on your own. That kind of person doesn't deserve to eat regular meals." That is how they justified cutting down my food.
On February 10 last year, 2008, my family came into my room. They asked me, "Do you want to find out about the Unification Church?" But over the years I had never changed my position. Over the years I was telling them, "You call this protection? This is not protection, this is arrogance. This is confinement and an attempt to take away my Unification Church faith. Stop this crime, stop this human rights violation!" That is what I kept telling them during the time I was kept there. When my older brother heard me saying that he said, "OK. Get out of here." I was 44 years old then. I left there without a penny in my pocket. I was angry about that. I had an argument with them but I was malnourished, so they picked me up, and they threw me out of the front door. They tossed me out, and my older brother picked up a pair of shoes that I was wearing when I was first confined and threw them out at me. So that is how I was released after 12 years and 5 months.
I'm truly grateful to God and True Parents for letting me maintain my faith during that long period, but this is after 12 years. I didn't know what to do after I was thrown out of the apartment just like that. The only church location that I knew in my head was the Headquarters Church in Japan, so I started walking towards that. There was a police box on my way, so I entered there and I told them what had been done to me. I said, "I was confined there in that apartment right there for 12 years," but I was not expecting much.
Many times in these confinement situations, the police are actually involved, but the police officers always say this is something between the parents and their children, "We are not going to get involved," and in most cases the police refuse to have anything to do with it. I was not expecting much from that policeman, and sure enough he didn't do anything. He refused to listen to what I had to say. So I said, "All right. But any way, I was thrown out of the apartment without a penny in my pocket. Please give me at least a train fare," but he said, "I can't give money to a stranger," so I asked him to draw a map then. I used that map to walk to the Headquarters Church.
I later saw it was a distance of about 10 km. I thought maybe I could walk about 3 hours. But because I had not been walking for a long time, about half way there my knees began to hurt and I couldn't continue to walk normally. So I picked up a stick that was lying by the side of the street and used it as a staff in order to continue to walk. Finally I came to the main road in the vicinity of the Headquarters Church. I was in so much pain, and I couldn't walk anymore. This was in February and it was a cold period, and I was kicked out in the evening. This was late at night and I was malnourished. And I was afraid that if were to climb the stairs and fall, I might freeze to death. I was wearing a sweater but in the fight we had at the end, it was torn a bit, and I was wearing a jersey, training pants and the pair of shoes that you saw a while ago.
I had been cutting my own hair over the years, so it wasn't cut very cleanly and I was using a walking stick and could barely walk, so I probably looked like a beggar and people would pass by but everyone would ignore me. At that time, I was telling myself, "I don't know where God is going to lead me, but I will continue to do my 5 % until the end." I wasn't sure I was in the vicinity, and I wasn't sure how to get exactly to the church so I decided to ask someone. First I asked a man. He said, "I don't know." Then there was a young woman and when she came around the corner, I called out to her, "Excuse me, I think that the headquarters of the HSA-UWC is somewhere in this neighborhood. Do you happen to know it?"
This is how I was looking with my walking stick. I could barely stand. Then she stopped and said, "I'm a member of that church," and she showed me a copy of the Holy Songs and I thought that this is really the person that God has sent to me. I told her what had happened, and when I was confined I didn't have any information about what may have happened to True Father. I thought it was possible because of his advanced age that he may have passed on to the spirit world, so I asked her, "Is True Father healthy?" She smiled and said, "Yes, he's in good health." I was so grateful to hear that.
She called a taxi and gave me some money. That is how finally I could make my way to the church. But I was in a situation where I couldn't go to the toilet by myself so I was taken to the hospital that day. The doctor who saw me diagnosed me with malnutrition and inflammation of the knees.
Most of the people who carry out this kind of abduction and confinement are the family members of our brothers and sisters. Unfortunately in Japan the church has a very bad reputation, and the families who have adult members in the church become so concerned. They go to the internet and check many things. They try to figure out what to do, and in most of the cases they come in contact with the Christian ministers who oppose our church. The family members, with the feeling of grasping at straws, receive counseling from these ministers, and they fill them with one-sided wrong information and make the family members take the wrong decisions. "Your child is risking his life with his faith. Are you willing to quit your job for the sake of your child? There is only one way to get your child out of that church and that is to put them in protection to convince them." That is the abduction and the confinement.
Whether or not they are successful in making the person leave, there is a large amount of money that is given from the parents to those people who carry out the abduction and the confinement. My parents paid the full amount, and I think they paid more than $100,000.00. This is a business that is going on. There are members who were convinced to leave, and there are lawyers who are working with these ministers who are opposed to our church, leftist lawyers. These leftist lawyers convince the former members to sue the church and they take the church to court and all that money goes to the lawyer.
It is very clear how these ministers and lawyers are operating. They're very good at criticizing the Unification Church. They would use a very small situation and make the Unification Church look like the embodiment of evil. Even now this is going on across the country. The government officials know what is going on but they're refusing to do anything about stopping these crimes of abduction and confinement. Opposing ministers, leftist lawyers and the mass media are all involved in this, and right now in Japan it is extremely difficult to solve this problem, and we can't do anything about it. Right now five members are being confined, but we cannot do anything about it.
In this kind of situation, after I was released, there were many things that surprised me. First, I got on the train for the first time in a long time, and I saw everyone sitting down with some kind of device in their hands and they were using them with their thumbs. I couldn't figure out what they were doing with their thumbs. Now I use one of those, too. I was very surprised by that in the beginning.
Another thing that surprised me was that we have True Children here with us today. I was really wonderfully and amazingly surprised to see what wonderful work the True Children are doing. We put so much faith in them now, they are wonderful. In Japan we have no way of dealing with this confinement and abduction. In Japan we have a very urgent providential responsibility but there is no way to deal with this. There are sisters here now in Korea who experienced the confinement but they have no one to talk to and share their experiences. So the people who have had this kind of experience have no place to go for counseling or talking, always keeping these experiences in themselves, always living in fear that they may be abducted again." Maybe today I will be abducted again!"
This is a democratic country, but that is the situation they're dealing with until now. But now the True Children are standing in the forefront and they're dealing with this issue, not just in Japan, but also in Korea and in America, and we're hand in hand now, in order to resolve this problem in Japan. We cannot allow the violation of the human rights of our members to continue. The fact that they are standing up like this is so wonderful. So as a representative of people who went through the confinement experience, I want to thank you from the bottom of my heart. God and True Parents are giving us this providence, I'm truly so grateful. As one person who has been a victim of that confinement, I want to fight with you to resolve this problem. That is my determination. Thank you very much.