Before writing about Japan’s guidelines, I want to state where I stand: I believe in G-d. Not as a hedge or an inherited habit, but as a settled conviction – though my doctrine is not settled. My current thinking leans toward something like a goddess, or the universe itself, understood as a whole of which we are all constituent parts, though I know that is too simple, a placeholder for a mystery I have not finished thinking through. What I am certain of is this: G-d has no institutional monopoly-holder. I avoid organised religion wherever I reasonably can, because every institutional form of it I have encountered has, at some point, been captured by political self-interest – not because faith is false, but because institutions accrue power, and power attracts people who will use a doctrine of hell, or of dispossession, or of national security, to secure obedience rather than serve the people who trust them. That conviction is the lens through which I read Japan’s guidelines, because the real question is not whether the state should stop parents frightening children with hell. It is what happens when one form of institutional self-interest, the state’s, arms itself against another, the church’s, in the name of a child who has no real voice in either contest.
My thesis is narrower than that premise, and I want to state it once, plainly: Japan’s 2022 Q&A was right to end religious exemption from ordinary child-abuse standards, and wrong to leave the line between coercive control and catechesis for individual caseworkers to invent case by case – a defect visible in how the guidance’s own illustrative language fails to hold that line even on its own terms, and in the narrower, documented pattern of who the guidance has actually fallen on since.
The instrument’s history matters as much as its text, and the record here is genuinely contested. The document itself, “Questions and Answers on Responding to Child Abuse Related to Religious Beliefs, etc.,” was issued by the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare on 27 December 2022. According to a Freedom of Information disclosure obtained by Human Rights Without Frontiers – a claim I could not independently verify beyond that disclosure, but which Japan’s own later account does not contradict – the substantive drafting ran from 5 to 23 December 2022, in closed-door sessions with the Japanese Society for Cult Prevention and Recovery, whose chairperson had publicly called for a new category of religion-based child abuse two months earlier. Japan’s government does not accept the characterisation that flows from that timeline. In its formal reply to the United Nations, dated 27 June 2024, it states plainly that the Q&A was prepared “while listening to the opinions of a wide range of related parties,” and it corrects one specific factual claim in the UN communication: the Jehovah’s Witnesses, it says, had requested a meeting on 8 December 2022, and were given one, at the ministry’s Child and Family Policy Bureau, on 26 December 2022. That correction is worth taking at face value – a meeting was granted, and Japan is right that it happened. But 26 December sits one day before the Q&A’s public release and, on the FOIA timeline the government does not dispute, three days after the substantive drafting had already closed. A meeting held after a text is finished is not evidence that the text was shaped by it. Whether that is best read as bad faith or as bureaucratic sequencing – a courtesy briefing scheduled once the drafting calendar allowed it – the practical effect is the same: the group whose practices the guidance would principally touch was told what had been decided, not asked what should be.
The Q&A’s central innovation is a definition, and it deserves to be quoted in its own words rather than a critic’s paraphrase of it. The ministry’s own illustrative example of religion-based psychological abuse is a parent threatening a child with words to the effect of, “if you don’t – or if you do – this, you’ll go to hell.” Read as written, that is not a ban on teaching that hell exists. It is aimed at a conditional structure – a threat tied to a named act, used against an individual child to extract compliance in the moment.
The trouble is that this conditional structure does not, in itself, separate coercion from catechesis, because ordinary religious instruction about hell is very often conditional too. “If you sin and do not repent, you will be judged” is a standard formulation of Catholic catechesis, delivered to a room of children as general doctrine rather than leverage against one child’s disobedience – and it has the identical grammatical shape as the coercive private threat the Q&A is trying to name. A caseworker handed the ministry’s illustrative sentence in isolation has no textual instruction for telling a general theological conditional from an individually targeted one; the words alone will not do it. What would do it is not present in the Q&A’s own wording: whether the threat was addressed to one identified child in private or delivered as instruction to a group, and whether the named consequence of non-compliance was a specific, often secular act – attend this, obey that, stop seeing this friend – rather than a general statement of what the tradition teaches happens to unrepented sin. The Q&A gestures at the right distinction without ever operationalising it.
What reaches the classroom compounds the risk, though I want to be careful about how confidently I can say so. Reporting from outlets aligned with the religious minorities most affected – principally Bitter Winter, which is linked to the Center for Studies on New Religions and has an evident stake in this fight – describes the illustrated pamphlets subsequently distributed to schools as compressing the ministry’s conditional wording into a flat, unconditional line: children warned about being “threatened by words like ‘you will go to hell.'” I have not been able to locate or verify the pamphlets’ original Japanese wording independently of that characterisation, so I hold it more loosely than the Q&A’s own text, which I have read directly. If the compression is accurate, it removes even the narrow textual anchor the ministry’s own formulation provides. If it is not, the underlying problem I describe above – that the conditional form itself cannot distinguish coercion from catechesis – still stands on the Q&A’s own wording alone.
The United Nations record from 2024 is the best evidence of how the distinction has actually performed, and it cuts in both directions, which is worth setting out fairly. On 30 April 2024, four Special Rapporteurs – on freedom of religion or belief, the right to education, freedom of expression, and freedom of peaceful assembly and association – wrote to Tokyo. Their letter states plainly that while the Jehovah’s Witnesses are not named in the Q&A, their practices “appear to be targeted by the new policy,” and separately that the guidance risks setting a lower bar for finding abuse in religious households than in non-religious ones. Japan’s June 2024 response rejects the second claim outright, stating that it does “not believe that the Q&A appears to encourage” any such lower threshold, and defending the drafting process as broad rather than narrow. On the narrow, verifiable question of whether the guidance has in fact been invoked against this community, though, Japan’s own response supplies the clearest evidence available: it acknowledges that a Jehovah’s Witness representative informed the government an attacker had cited the Q&A to justify a violent act against a member, and calls this “highly regrettable” while declining to revise the guidance on that basis. That is not proof the ministry intended the document to be used that way. It is documented proof that it has been. The UN Human Rights Office’s October 2025 follow-up statement, expressing continuing concern about stigmatisation of religious minorities linked to the pamphlets, suggests this was not an isolated incident rather than a settled pattern – the most honest summary is that the guidance has been cited to justify at least one act of violence, that Special Rapporteurs judge it to be functioning as targeted, and that the government disputes the design was ever unequal while not disputing the effect.
The hardest question underneath all of this is one I raised too quickly the first time I wrote about this guidance: whose account of abuse counts, and at what age. A five-year-old and a sixteen-year-old are not the same rights-bearer, and a rule that treats them as functionally the same – a child, presumptively incapable of consenting to any religious practice a caseworker flags – is not calibrated to either of them well. Take two practices the Q&A framework currently processes through the same lens. A parent bringing a reluctant eight-year-old to compulsory Sunday service is, on any reasonable account, well within the ordinary range of parental authority to transmit a tradition, even against a child’s momentary preference. A congregation’s judicial committee – a panel of adult elders – summoning a sixteen-year-old alone and interrogating her about the specifics of her sexual conduct, with continued standing in her family and community made contingent on her answers, is a different order of act: an adult institution extracting a coerced confession from a minor, under threat of social and familial consequence, on a subject where the power imbalance is total. Only the second deserves the label the Q&A is reaching for.
A workable threshold has to do the work the Q&A gestures at but never specifies, and I would propose three cumulative elements. First, individuation: was the pressure directed at an identified child, or an identifiable, bounded group of children – a congregation’s youth subjected to a coordinated programme of fear-based control counts here as much as one targeted child does – rather than delivered as general instruction to an unbounded audience with no coordinated follow-through. Second, leverage: was a specific, named act of compliance or disclosure the price of avoiding the threatened consequence, rather than the consequence being taught as abstract doctrine independent of the child’s immediate behaviour. Third, an age-scaled evidentiary standard: for children under roughly twelve, a rebuttable presumption that they cannot meaningfully consent to an individualised disciplinary or confessional process conducted by religious authority alone; for adolescents, no blanket presumption of incapacity, but a requirement that any such process include a support person independent of the religious authority, and that the child retain a genuine, threat-free right to decline. This three-part test is built for the specific harm this essay is about – coercive psychological pressure dressed in religious language – and should stay there. It is not the right instrument for physical neglect, such as the Q&A’s separate treatment of a guardian refusing a medically necessary blood transfusion for a child; that question turns on imminent physical harm and existing medical-neglect law, not on whether a threat was individuated, leveraged, or age-appropriately consented to, and folding it into the same three-part test would blur two problems that need separate answers.
Someone still has to author that threshold, and I was too quick, the first time, to imply that no ministry could be trusted with the job. That is not quite my objection. My objection is to who was in the room during those eighteen days in December 2022, and when the one group we can actually date was let in: an anti-cult advocacy body was consulted from the outset; the Jehovah’s Witnesses were granted a meeting only after the substantive drafting had closed, one day before publication. A threshold like the one above should be set the way most consequential administrative rules are set in functioning democracies: drafted with input from child-welfare specialists and scholars of comparative religion, circulated for submission to the affected communities – survivor advocates for shūkyō nisei and representatives of the minority faiths the rule would bind – before the text is locked, not after. MHLW may still be the right author. Being handed a meeting the day before publication is not what consultation ordinarily means, whatever the government calls it in its own defence. I believe in G-d, and I believe every child terrorised into obedience by an adult who controls their survival deserves the law’s full protection. I do not believe a threshold finalised before the people it would bind were let in the room, and handed to the frontline as a pamphlet that may have shed even its own limiting language, is yet capable of telling the difference between that child and the one taken, reluctantly, to church on Sunday.
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Bakchos is the founder of Blak and Black, an Australian media and advocacy platform established in 2010. Bakchos writes from the intersecting perspectives of Wiradjuri heritage, Jewish identity, and humanism.
© Bakchos, September 2026
