Profile

  • Raio (male, 30s)
  • Relationship to MLM: mother is an active member (approx. 30 years)
  • Company (Company Z): sells a wide range of household goods; founded over 30 years ago

How my mother became a member

Nobody in the family quite remembers how my mother's involvement began — it was that long ago. According to my father's notes, it was before I was born. She had gotten to know an "upline" recruiter, M, who asked if she could buy just a little with her own allowance. My father agreed.

In my early childhood I don't recall any particular harm from the MLM. In elementary school we hosted birthday parties for all my friends and took a family trip every year — a genuinely happy household.

Things began to change around the time my mother had been a member for ten years, when I was in the upper grades of elementary school. She started talking about wanting to build a house big enough for my grandparents to live with us, and we ended up building an expensive new home on a large loan. Around then she kept saying things like "I'll take you to Hokkaido" or "I'll take you abroad." We were excited about both the new house and the trips.

Looking back, I think she too was being told to "voice her dreams." After moving into the new house, she visited Company Z's overseas headquarters and became fully absorbed. Hurting her back during the move gave her a taste for the idea of earning income without working, which became part of the pull. Nearly everything in the house became Company Z products — water purifiers, air purifiers, pots, supplements, seasonings, detergents.

The first real conflict in the family was with my father and my paternal grandmother. My mother wanted to give my grandmother two air purifiers as a gift; my father objected and my grandmother declined, and my mother was deeply frustrated. She began badmouthing my grandmother often. She then asked my father to help with the Company Z business too, and the two of them started attending meetings together every Wednesday night from 8pm to 11pm. At home they practiced demonstrations and marketing pitches; on weekends they visited my father's clients to discuss next month's targets. To make things worse, my father's employer went bankrupt. Between the MLM and the growing discord, my parents fought constantly — even as a child I felt their divorce was only a matter of time.

School years

With the recent attention on "religious second-generation" harm following the Unification Church controversy, I want to record, as an "MLM second-generation child," some of what was hard as a kid.

1. Supplements and protein at every meal

They tasted awful. I always drank them while gagging. My siblings sometimes hid and threw theirs away, and I saw them get yelled at for it, so I never resisted.

2. Meals

Because the marketing claimed you could cook everything with the Company Z pot set, we cooked rice in it too. We had no rice cooker and didn't use a microwave (I think because of a belief that electromagnetic waves are harmful to the body — even when I forcibly brought my own microwave home as a university student, it was never used). Once the rice cooked in the pot went cold, we ate it cold or refried in the pot (it burns easily). I wanted plain warm white rice, not fried rice.

3. Money

We genuinely had no money, so allowance stopped after the house was bought. Almost everything was hand-me-downs from my siblings. Club gear was whatever friends gave us — a little humiliating, looking back. The things I remember my parents actually buying for me are a baseball bat and, once, a jacket I was forced to buy at a New Year's gathering. We never ate out as a family. On the other hand, I did many extracurricular lessons and the money for those was provided. My mother also recruited my friends' parents and my lesson teachers — though as far as I can remember, this never damaged my own friendships.

How you read this is up to you. This was roughly 20 years ago. My mother had her own job and wasn't particularly notorious in the neighborhood, so the people she recruited seem to have responded with an adult "well, that's just how she is about MLM" kind of shrug.

My own suffering came mostly as an adult, so I have some doubt about how much I really suffered as a child. I was also the youngest, so this is only what I could see. As you'll read later, my older sister saw a completely different picture. How this is experienced varies enormously by health, birth order, gender, and relationship to the member.

I mention this because, through interviewing many others, I've noticed that within a family, the burden often falls disproportionately on one particular member (and many people haven't even told their own relatives about it). If even a little more sharing happens within families, facts you didn't know might surface, and some relatives might be saved. That's what I hope for, which is why I try to include the perspectives of relatives beyond myself. Because MLM only recruits adults, the harm differs somewhat from cult religions where harm often starts in early childhood — though of course some people are affected from a very young age too. I want to collect many kinds of testimony. (Reference: an article on MLM second-generation children.)

I've digressed. As high school entrance exams approached, my mother suggested I attend a school near my grandparents' house. I loved my grandparents, the school district was good, and it let me get away from the household turmoil, so I spent three years commuting from their home.

Through those three years — while my parents' situation grew even worse behind the scenes — I was raised purely on my grandparents' love, my cram school fees fully covered by them. Without that time, I would not be who I am today. I am grateful to my grandparents for the rest of my life.

My older sister and brother were also each keeping their distance from the household around the same time. Once I, the youngest, entered university and tuition was settled, my parents divorced — through family court and even a private investigator. The cause was the discord caused by the MLM and an affair that followed from it. We children went to live with my mother, who continued paying the mortgage.

As for the MLM: water purifiers and the like were forced on me even in my one-room apartment. The filters were expensive, and there wasn't even space for it in a studio kitchen, so it went mostly unused. For my "university entrance gift," I was given products by M, whom I barely knew, and taken to her home party. My mother worships M and constantly talks about how much she owes her — though as far as I remember I'd only met M twice. I can only feel resentment toward the person who, in my view, brainwashed my mother.

Even recently she said, "M is important to me, please be good to her. Her husband's (a doctor) talk on nutrition is the foundation of my nutritional knowledge. I'm nothing but grateful." I wonder if she was trying to warn me off. Afterward, she never managed to earn from the MLM and kept struggling with the mortgage. Part of my scholarship money, and the New Year's gift money for all three of us children, disappeared into loan repayments.

As a working adult

Once I started working, she began regularly asking me for money. My older brother gave a fixed amount every month; I only gave when specifically asked, since I could see that giving regularly would only invite unlimited demands. That amount, separate from the childhood savings, came to about 10 million yen combined between my siblings and me (3 million from me, 7 million from my brother) — none of it repaid to this day, and we don't ask for it back. She'd also borrowed from my father's parents and her own parents to build the house, so the whole extended family suffered financially.

By this point I was somewhat resigned — paying whenever asked simply to avoid conflict. Letters would arrive from her too: they'd start with a birthday greeting, then shift into the importance of health, the necessity of supplements and water purifiers, sometimes with a health newsletter M distributed to her team enclosed, or a sheet meant for her own sales pitches. It always felt like MLM was the only thing in her head.

Living away from home, I once visited and she said "I want you to meet a friend." Something felt off, but the person turned out to be her old high school classmate, and we just had a meal. I thought that was the end of it — but I was then taken to a clinic run by M's son, where a Company Z meeting was being held using the clinic's weekend reception area. I felt deceived. I barely remember the details of that meeting. About ten people were there, clearly current members. It covered the need for passive income (residual income) and included a video, ending with each participant declaring what they'd realized and their future goals. It was a genuinely repulsive scene for a first-timer. When asked for my own declaration, I recall reframing it in terms of stock investing and the general logic of passive income.

Marriage

I later got married. The night before my staying at my parents' house before the wedding, my mother asked if I'd become a member. I truly thought, please don't bring this up right now. She explained the fee structure, but having grown up disliking MLM because of her, and given the timing, none of it registered. To avoid disrupting the wedding, I signed. I never bought products afterward, and cancelled a year later simply because I didn't want to pay the annual fee.

My mother had long invited my adult friends over for cooking classes and Company Z demonstrations. After marriage I was determined never to let my wife visit alone, fearing she'd be recruited too. My mother wanted to contact my wife directly, so I told her: any MLM-related conversation must go through me. She never contacted my wife directly after that, which was good, though my mother's opinion of my wife suffered as a result. Still, I believe — and still believe — this was the only way to protect her. With my own father also divorced, I feel deeply sorry to my wife and children for this family history.

Even after that, my mother kept asking for loans. "Please, about 100,000 yen again this month" — asked as if it were completely normal. After marriage it was no longer only my money, so my wife and I started discussing every request together: "she's asking again, what should we do." Eventually, sensing I couldn't keep paying forever, I even suggested to my wife handing over a lump sum of 1–2 million yen in exchange for never lending again — my own sense of money had become that distorted. My brother, too, would say "I put in more than you, so you should too," which made it feel unavoidable. I now believe we, the children, were being manipulated by our mother in this respect.

Realizing this wasn't sustainable, I sought counseling. My wife and I visited a counselor together and explained our family situation. What shocked me was being told, plainly, at the end: "This is your mother's fault." I had vaguely sensed the situation was abnormal, but had accepted it as unavoidable and kept paying. And beyond the MLM, I of course still felt gratitude toward my mother as a parent, so I couldn't bring myself to frame it as her fault. Hearing it from a third party — not my wife — that this situation truly was wrong, felt like a weight lifting off my shoulders, and I couldn't stop crying.

Selling the family home

Following the counselor's advice, I decided to address the financial trouble at its root. Since the core problem was clearly the mortgage, I consulted my siblings, grandparents, and aunt — without telling my mother — and decided to push for selling the house.

Knowing she'd have strong emotional attachment to the house and would resist, my siblings and I spent months preparing: understanding her income including the MLM, getting the house appraised, running future financial simulations, scouting relocation options, rehearsing how the day itself would go, and mapping out each child's stance on the MLM. Since persuasion from the children alone might not be enough, we asked our grandparents and aunt's family to join us too. (My mother disliked the idea of her sister-in-law's family getting involved in our household issues, so we kept their attendance secret from her beforehand, among other preparations.)

Persuading her that day was genuinely difficult. As always, logical explanation didn't work; she became emotional and, in the end, escalated to various dramatic behaviors. Seeing this, whichever child felt endangered would apologize — a pattern she had used many times to stop children from opposing her. That day too, we explained the facts calmly and carefully, but it went in circles. Even crying and pleading emotionally didn't get through. So we asked directly what she was actually worried about.

It turned out her concern was whether selling would break an agreement made with my father during the divorce, and whether he might demand money as a result. In the end, we called my father right there on the spot, got his word, and resolved her concern — and only then did she agree to sell the house. Afterward, she used the proceeds to move into a small apartment, and the demands for money from us stopped.

Conflict between my mother and sister

Around the same time, my mother and older sister came into conflict. The trigger was a Company Z product my mother had given my sister as a gift, which my sister never used.

Even before that, my sister — who hadn't felt well since giving birth — had constantly been told to make sure she took her supplements. My sister also lived physically close to my mother, which was part of what made the friction worse. On top of that, being the eldest daughter and the same gender, she faced far more pressure from our mother than my brother or I did.

"Why don't you understand how good the products are," my mother would say, only escalating her behavior further. Eventually she left a note at my sister's child's school, telling the child to come to her house, saying things like "you can't raise a child properly, I'll raise my grandchild myself." My sister felt her own child had nearly been abducted and went to the police. After that, she chose to cut off all contact unless my mother stopped the Company Z business.

My mother may not have intended things to go that far. But communication is defined by how it's received. Cutting ties was my sister's judgment about what was necessary to protect her own family. Our aunt again stepped in to mediate at this estrangement; because my sister was too cornered to tell our mother directly herself, my aunt and her husband delivered a written notice to my mother demanding no further contact with my sister.

This obviously caused our mother emotional damage too, but the relatives who had lived with this for years judged that nothing less drastic would work — there was no telling what she might do otherwise. Naturally this also damaged the relationship between our mother and aunt, and put our aunt under real psychological strain. Our mother still didn't quit the MLM, but with my sister estranged and my brother and I not intervening much, an uneasy peace followed.

Inheritance

December 2020. My maternal grandfather passed away. My grandmother was elderly too, and seeing my aunt and mother work together on the procedures, I naively thought family relations might finally be improving.

But — I wasn't part of the inheritance discussions as a grandchild, so this is secondhand — trouble arose here too. My mother, who resented our aunt for having mediated during the house sale and my sister's estrangement, brought that history up again during the inheritance discussions, insisting to her other siblings how much she had suffered. Her real goal wasn't the inheritance itself but validation — she wanted to be understood for "how much she'd been hurt, and how she'd cared for her parents' health using MLM products." My mother's siblings, who didn't fully understand the situation, ended up supporting her, deepening the rift among them.

Finally recognizing it as a social issue

In 2021, my aunt shared a book by an author (Zyutan) about her own MLM-related marriage breakdown, and reading it, I was shocked at how closely it matched my mother's words and behavior — things like forcing cloth diapers (my sister had been told to use these on her own child), being shown photos of rusty water pipes to argue for the importance of water filters, or being unable to use a rice cooker or microwave. Reading this carefully written book, I finally understood that the whole chain of trouble connected to my mother was produced by the mechanism of multi-level marketing itself. If any reader whose relative is an MLM member hasn't read a book like this, I'd strongly recommend it.

I then started journaling my own situation on note (a Japanese blogging platform) — what had hurt me, what I wanted. Putting it into words gradually helped me organize my own thinking. I tried again, in my own words, to tell my mother about the problems with Company Z, testimony from former members, the mechanics behind the demonstrations. None of it reached her at all. Other relatives had tried the same thing for years without success, and I experienced firsthand that it simply doesn't get through.

In 2022 I reported her to Company Z, aiming to get her membership forcibly revoked. I listed the specific actions of hers that seemed to violate Japan's Specified Commercial Transactions Act and explained the details. Before doing so, I carefully considered what to report — worried about what might happen to my mother — and consulted relatives in advance. I filed anonymously, worried what might happen if my name reached her. Honestly, from talking with many others, I understood revocation was unlikely, but I hoped that at least a warning from the company to M might strain M's relationship with my mother and dampen her enthusiasm a little.

But the company's response was appalling. During the inquiry, because I'd mentioned she'd been forced into membership in the past, they asked for her member number, which I gave — while emphatically asking them not to let her know who had contacted them. The result: the company called my mother saying "your son contacted us — did something happen?" I had asked repeatedly for anonymity, and there's simply no way I'd have answered "yes" if asked directly like that. I realized the company's support desk simply wasn't thinking. I told my mother honestly that I had reported her, and nothing came of it either way.

Afterward, my maternal grandmother — who had quietly watched my mother for years — finally reached her limit over the inheritance dispute and wrote her a letter of complaint. It doesn't seem to have gotten through to my mother much, which is a shame. But my grandmother herself seemed to feel liberated — she started clearly refusing supplements she didn't want to take, and sounded genuinely relieved on the phone. That alone made me happy. I then took my grandmother on a small trip, and reunited with my father after 15 years, and with my paternal grandmother after 20.

Now

My mother still sends Company Z information from time to time, hoping I'll one day understand its value. Thankfully, since various people have pushed back over the years, the frequent Zoom health-seminar invitations have stopped, but she still shares things like the company's charitable activities, books written by people connected to it, or videos shared by other members. I try to reply politely when the topic isn't MLM-related, but honestly it's difficult. I feel my own heart has grown more distant from her recently.

My mother is unlikely to let go, even now, of what she has believed for over 30 years. Personally, I don't actually mind if she continues as a Company Z member — as long as there's no financial collapse, no illegal recruiting, and no trouble toward relatives (by which I mean behavior demanding recognition for being "in MLM," or forcing products on people). I only wish we could talk about things other than Company Z, though even that seems difficult.

There was a period when I wondered if there was anything to be done about my sister's stance of not seeing our mother as long as she continues with Company Z. But having faced my mother again myself, I've come to understand that my sister's position is unavoidable too — she needs to protect her own family. My mother's need for recognition — for Company Z, and by extension for the life she has built around it — may simply never be satisfied. If we forcibly took Company Z away from her, we might destroy the very foundation of who she is, so I don't think further action along those lines is realistic.

I've tried to include something of the struggles each relative has gone through, but there is so much more that can't be fully expressed. Every one of my relatives has suffered in their own, different way — more than I have. We cannot afford to create any more trouble among them. My grandmother, my aunt, everyone is of an age now where I just want them to live in peace, even an imperfect one. Family relationships this broken take time to rebuild — I honestly don't even know if rebuilding is possible. I'd love for the whole family to gather together again someday, though I doubt it could ever be with completely open hearts. That's exactly why I no longer want to dig up the past — I want each of us, individually, to move forward.

In closing

What I can do is limited, and the challenge is large, but I want to help even one more person carrying a similar kind of suffering. I want to think about ways to make it a little less likely that new people will end up carrying this burden. And I want to raise the issue with the multi-level marketing structures that continue to produce families like mine.

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