Sushi: A Moonie Plot

Rev Moon: King of the California Roll.

April 17, 2006

2 Min Read
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2:00 PM -- Now it can be told. The Chicago Tribune reports on a successful campaign by the Rev Sun Myung Moon's Unification Church to subvert American eating habits:

  • In a remarkable story that has gone largely untold, Moon and his followers created an enterprise that reaped millions of dollars by dominating one of America's trendiest indulgences: sushi...

    Adhering to a plan Moon spelled out more than three decades ago in a series of sermons, members of his movement managed to integrate virtually every facet of the highly competitive seafood industry. The Moon followers' seafood operation is driven by a commercial powerhouse, known as True World Group. It builds fleets of boats, runs dozens of distribution centers and, each day, supplies most of the nation's estimated 9,000 sushi restaurants.

    Although few seafood lovers may consider they're indirectly supporting Moon's religious movement, they do just that when they eat a buttery slice of tuna or munch on a morsel of eel in many restaurants...

    "I have the entire system worked out, starting with boat building," Moon said in "The Way of Tuna," a speech given in 1980. "After we build the boats, we catch the fish and process them for the market, and then have a distribution network. This is not just on the drawing board; I have already done it."

    In the same speech, he called himself "king of the ocean..."

And remember those wacky mass weddings? Well, not so wacky after all:

  • He even suggested that the church's mass weddings could play a role in the business plan by making American citizens out of Japanese members of the movement. This would help them avoid fishing restrictions applied to foreigners.

    "A few years ago the American government set up a 200-mile limit for offshore fishing by foreign boats," Moon said in the 1980 "Way of Tuna" sermon. But by marrying Japanese members to Americans, "we are not foreigners; therefore Japanese brothers, particularly those matched to Americans, are becoming ..... leaders for fishing and distribution" of his movement's businesses.

We've always found sushi kinda creepy. It just got creepier.

— Larry, "Way of Deep Frying" Monkey, Light Reading

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