Political Parties of Japan

Initially, the Japanese political party was looked upon as causing disharmony or even rebellion. Commoners were to be without a political role with samurai serving their lords without objection. However, bureaucratic factions became the norm of both the shogunate and the daimyo domains by late Tokugawa times, resulting in Meiji Japanese taking quickly to political parties. Itagaki Taisuke would create the first political party in 1874, which would grow rapidly into the “freedom and people’s rights movement.” Okuma Shigenobu would create a second party movement in 1882. From these two sources would begin the two major traditional party currents.

Attempts at forming a Socialist and a Communist Party would be legally banned or suppressed by authorities. Socialist parties that were able to form were also forced to dissolve in 1940 and enter the officially sponsored Imperial Rule Assistance Association. After the end of World War II, the Communist Party was revived its few remaining members that had been just released from prison or retuned from exile. The Social Mass Party was also resurrected as the Socialist Party, with it receiving 26% of the popular vote in 1947. The party would split between 1951 and 1955, and then again in 1960, resulting in moderates forming the Democratic Socialist Party. Only the Komeito, founded by the Soka Gakkai religious group in 1964, served purely as a postwar faction.

The Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), or Jiminto, possessed a strong rural background. Local politics dominated the political scene, with many local politicians running as independents. The smaller and more rural an electorate was the greater, the greater chance of an independent candidate. This enabled candidates to pull in a much broader variety of votes due to a lack of a centralized platform. Thus, most Japanese voters declared themselves independent.

The heart of the LDP has been its Diet membership, which makes up the majority of the delegates at its national convention where they elect the party president, who eventually is chosen by the party’s Diet majority as the prime minister. These Diet members are closely scrutinized as an attempt to maintain party discipline. Those who are strictly faithful to the party may be rewarded with influential assignments in the party organization, including a position as the prime minister.

Despite the strong solidarity of the LDP, one of its outstanding features is its division into factions. These leader-follower groups of 40-100 members centered on some particularly powerful Diet member who hoped to use this faction as a base for his bid at party presidency and the prime minister. A grouping of two or more factions was essential to achieve this goal, giving rise to “mainstream” and “anti- mainstream” divisions within the party. These factions were almost universally condemned, however, this propensity to join smaller groups is a backbone principal of the lesser members of the Diet.

Edwin O. Reischauer and Marius B. Jansen, “Political Parties” in The Japanese Today: Change and Continuity (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1995).