Japanese Wives, Korean Husbands: Blessings and Bloodlines in the Unification Church
Angie Heo
November 18, 2026 / 18:00-19:30 / In person only
(The location of the talk will be emailed to those who registered)
Registration required: https://forms.cloud.microsoft/r/69cv8mrNki
Since the Unification Church's dissolution earlier this year, there has been much reckoning with Japan's fraught role in this transnational movement: its finances, its politics, and its doctrine of bloodline atonement. One of the most striking images in this reckoning is the roughly 7,000 Japanese women who traveled to Korea to marry bachelors in the countryside. Drawing on popular representations of these women in Japanese media, this talk situates their hypervisibility within broader battles over the historical memory of Japan's colonial rule in Korea. It also explores how critics folded these women into the Church's "spiritual sales" and "mind control" scandals, one instance within a wider discourse of victimization, trafficking, and coercion targeting "Asian women" as a category. Ultimately, the talk situates this case within a longer reckoning with sex, race, and migration at the heart of family and gender politics in Japan and beyond.
Angie Heo is a sociocultural anthropologist and author of The Political Lives of Saints: Christian-Muslim Mediation in Egypt (University of California Press 2018). She is currently an Associate Professor in the Divinity School at the University of Chicago. After receiving her Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of California at Berkeley, she taught at Barnard College and held fellowships at Emory University, University of Toronto, the Max Planck Society, and the East-West Center. Her current research turns to the transnational history and international politics of the Unification Church (now the Family Federation for World Peace and Unification) in Korea, Japan, and the U.S.
This talk is organized by Dodom Kim (Assistant Professor, Sophia University).
