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Japan Komeito
Following the July 1993 House of Representatives
election, the
Komeito (the euphemistic English translation of the
Japanese name
is Clean Government Party) held fifty-one seats in the
House of
Representatives and joined the Hosokawa coalition. The
Komeito was
an offshoot of the Soka Gakkai, which had been founded in
1930 as
an independent lay organization of the Nichiren Shoshu
sect of
Buddhism, whose numbers were estimated at 750,000 in 1958
and more
than 35 million in the late 1980s. In 1962 the Soka
Gakkai,
established the League for Clean Government, which became
a regular
political party, the Komeito, two years later. Ties
between the
Komeito and the Soka Gakkai were formally dissolved in
1970, and
the image of an "open party" was promoted. But the
resignation in
1989 of a Komeito Diet member, Ohashi Toshio, following
his
criticism of the religious leader Ikeda Daisaku, suggested
that the
Soka Gakkai's influence over the party remained
substantial.
The party's supporters tended to be people who were
largely
outside the privileged labor union and "salarymen" circles
of
lifetime employment in large enterprises. The Komeito's
programs
were rather vague. They emphasized welfare and quality of
life
issues. In foreign policy, they had dropped their previous
opposition to the Japan-United States security treaty and
the SelfDefense Forces. Komeito made up a substantial portion of
Hosokawa's
coalition government in 1993.
Data as of January 1994
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