Paper short abstract:

This paper draws on ethnographic research on Soka Gakkai to portray how member support of Komeito has changed in response to the party’s shifting policies vis-à-vis the Japanese Constitution.

Paper long abstract:

Komeito, the “Clean Government Party,” operates as the junior partner to the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) in Japan’s governing coalition. It is best known as a political party founded by Soka Gakkai, a Nichiren Buddhism-based New Religion that claims millions of adherent households in Japan. Soka Gakkai founded Komeito in 1964 and the religion and the party separated officially in 1970. Recent decades have seen progressive differentiation between the two organizations, yet Gakkai members in Japan nonetheless continue to treat electioneering on behalf of Komeito (and, since 1999, LDP partners) as a component of their religious practice.

Critics have focused recently on new strains that have developed between the religion and the party. Komeito was founded by Soka Gakkai on pacifist principles, and Gakkai members continue as peace activists even as they electioneer on behalf of a party that supported a Cabinet decision that permitted “collective self-defense” (shūdanteki jieikan) in 2014 and voted in favor of security laws in 2015 that reinterpret Article Nine, the Japanese Constitution’s “peace clause,” that may allow Japanese troops to serve in combat overseas. The party’s reversals have occasioned diverse reactions from their Gakkai supporters – from enthusiastic support, to qualified rationales that rely on innovative doctrinal justifications, to rebuke of Komeito, both publicly and more quietly within local Gakkai communities.

This paper draws on ethnographic investigations among Soka Gakkai members, and from materials produced by Komeito representatives, to portray how member support of Komeito has transformed as the party’s policies vis-à-vis the Japanese Constitution have shifted. It takes into account Komeito engagement with draft revisions to the Constitution proposed by the LDP in 2012 as it surveys Komeito’s changing Constitution-related stances. By placing Komeito’s recent policy shifts into a historical progression, through understanding ways Komeito politicians strategize within the coalition under LDP leader Abe Shinzō, and by taking into account concomitant changes in attitudes on the part of Gakkai voters, we can better understand the current Komeito stance on Constitutional revision and ways Soka Gakkai voters may ultimately sway government action on this issue.