Reverend Sun Myung Moon, founder of the controversial Unification Church and self-proclaimed “Second Coming of Christ," may have realized his dream of becoming King of the Ocean according to the Chicago Tribune. Beginning in the early 1980's, Moon and his followers have built a small seafood business venture into a sushi empire, boasting $250 million in revenues and supplying high quality fish to most of the country’s sushi restaurants. The company, True World Group, is controlled by Unification Church International, a non-profit company separate from the Unification Church (the full name: The Holy Spirit Association for the Unification of World Christianity). A 1978 congressional investigation found that this separation is likely for legal purposes only, since it is effectively a financial clearing house for Moon and his organization. (Monica Eng, Delroy Alexander and David Jackson, Chicago Tribune, 11 April 2006).

Sushi-lovers who disagree with Moon’s religious beliefs and right-wing politics may find it difficult to find a restaurant not supplied by True World. Critics have labeled the Unification Church a cult owing to its sketchy recruitment policies, blood separation rituals (where female members engaging in sexual acts with Moon for "purification"), mass weddings, fund-raising schemes, and tax evasion scandals(Biblical Discernment Ministries).

The message of Moon's sermon, The Way of the Tuna (trans. Bo Hi Pak, 13 July 1980), is essentially "Let's go fishing!" which is not in itself unsettling. What is bizarre is the capitalist motive thinly veiled by incoherent homilies. He spends a good amount of time extolling the virtues of tuna as a fish and then the act of fishing tuna, emphasizing that the venture would not be for the purposes of money-making:

Five hundred boats use about $50,000 worth of bait a day. Tuna season normally lasts 70 days, and the bait alone costs $3.5 million! If each boat is staffed by three people, that is 1,500 people in one area. If each boat spends $500 a day for 70 days, that is $1.5 million. This is an investment they make in order to have a chance to catch a part of the quota of 1,800 tuna that the government allows to be caught each year.

If you sell each tuna for $1,000, that is only $1.8 million. In other words tuna fishing is not a moneymaking investment. So it is extraordinary to break even at tuna fishing; it is virtually impossible. When I see the enthusiasm these people have for tuna fishing, I think that if they loved America the way they do fishing, it would have become the Kingdom of Heaven a long time ago. I always think that if Americans have that kind of heart and soul, why not harness it for kingdom building?

Clearly, he’s done the math. Moon says this explicitly: “I am certainly not fishing for money. I already have the foundation to move in any direction. My goal is to break the record and demonstrate the seagoing spirit to the world.”

For someone who denies any business intent, the rest of the speech that follows certainly sounds like someone with a business plan. Moon describes the amount paid for a marina, dock and the estate in Gloucester. He identifies the four global areas of fishing and strategies to get inside these lines. He speaks about preparing fish, catering for banquets, marketing plans, transportation, cold storage, and fish powder.

“There is a limited amount of land, and it gets poorer over the years, but the ocean is unlimited,” said Moon. This is troubling given the share True World has over sushi markets and the environmental crisis of overfishing, which are driving many ocean species to extinction.

“I am the founder of this gigantic spiritual movement, but I am also laying the foundation to solve future physical problems of the world,” said Moon. He continues: “Christian ministers are very interested in their honor and future, but I am crazy about salvation of the world, about how I can feed the world population. How I can help this nation. This is what I am thinking about day in and day out.” Seagoing spirit is one thing, but couching the operation in terms of feeding the world is disingenuous at best. Sashimi to fight famine? Preposterous.