Religion and Parties in Postwar Japan: When Faith Holds Seats

Last time, we watched prewar Japan control faith under State Shinto, and saw that control unwound with the country’s defeat. The Constitution of Japan, which took effect in 1947, guarantees freedom of religion in Article 20, stipulating that no religious organization may receive privileges from the state and that the state must not engage in religious education or religious activity. This is the principle of the separation of religion and state, built upon reflection on the prewar past.

Under that freedom, numerous religious organizations once again broadened their field of activity in postwar Japan. Some took up social work such as life counseling for believers, welfare, and peace movements. And a portion of them stepped into the channel of elections, seeking to carry their ideals into the political arena. Faith sought to hold seats. This story centers on the relationship between a certain party and a religious organization, one of the most repeatedly debated relationships in postwar Japan. Let it be said in advance: here we deal only with facts that have been publicly reported and established, taking neither side of the debate, and we set down side by side the viewpoints of both those who believe and those who criticize.

A Party Born of Faith

In postwar Japan, the best known party backed by a religious organization is Komeito. The organization behind it was Soka Gakkai, a lay religious body devoted to the Buddhism of Nichiren. Soka Gakkai rapidly increased its membership after the war, and from the 1950s into the 1960s it sent its own candidates to local assemblies and to the House of Councillors.

Then, on November 17, 1964, on the initiative of Daisaku Ikeda, then president of Soka Gakkai, Komeito was founded. Raising the founding spirit of ‘speaking with the masses, fighting with the masses, and dying among the masses,’ it set out as a party calling for the enrichment of welfare and the betterment of ordinary people’s lives. Backed by organized votes from a fixed base of support, Komeito grew within a short span into a force holding a certain number of seats in national politics.

The Turning Point of the Speech and Publication Obstruction Incident

In the course of its growth, Komeito and Soka Gakkai faced a great trial: the so-called Speech and Publication Obstruction Incident, which occurred from 1969 into 1970.

The trigger was the publication of a book criticizing the relationship between Soka Gakkai and Komeito. In 1969, when the political commentator Hirotatsu Fujiwara announced the release of ‘Cutting into Soka Gakkai,’ it was reported that there were approaches seeking to halt the publication or to revise its contents. A senior Komeito figure is said to have asked an influential Liberal Democratic Party figure to settle the matter, and that influential figure is said to have sounded out the author about shelving the publication, but the author went ahead with the release.

This affair drew great social criticism as a possible infringement of the freedom of speech and publication guaranteed by the constitution. At the same time, the close relationship between Soka Gakkai and Komeito was once again questioned from the standpoint of the separation of religion and state. In response to the voices of criticism, in May 1970 Daisaku Ikeda apologized for the series of acts and announced a policy of reviewing the relationship between Soka Gakkai and Komeito.

This declaration of 1970 came later to be known as the institutional separation. Specifically, Soka Gakkai executives stopped doubling as Komeito legislators, and Soka Gakkai was to confine itself strictly to the position of a supporting body of the party. It is recorded that terms derived from religion were removed from the party’s new platform set in the same year. Receiving the support of believers while, as an organization, drawing a line between them: the framework of the two bodies’ relationship thereafter was shaped at this time.

Toward a Wing of the Coalition Government

For Komeito, which had walked its path as an opposition party, a great turning point arrived in the 1990s. In 1993, when the Liberal Democratic Party’s long rule was broken and the Morihiro Hosokawa coalition government of several factions was formed, Komeito joined it and experienced the position of a ruling party for the first time.

After the subsequent political realignment, Komeito moved into a coalition with the Liberal Democratic Party in 1999. Thereafter, except for a temporary period, the coalition of the Liberal Democratic Party and Komeito long became one of the basic configurations of Japanese politics. Under the coalition, Komeito is said to have sought to reflect its own assertions in policy in fields such as welfare, education, and peace diplomacy. On the other hand, evaluations of a party holding organized votes remaining involved in government for so long have differed according to one’s standpoint.

What It Means for ‘Faith to Hold Seats’

The path of Komeito and Soka Gakkai is a case that cannot be bypassed when considering the relationship between religion and politics in postwar Japan. It is not merely the story of a particular organization; it presses upon us a more universal question. How far, within a democracy, is it permitted for people of faith to seek to reflect their values in politics, and where is restraint required? Such is the question.

Freedom of religion includes, along with the freedom not to believe, the freedom to act on the basis of belief. In that sense, to deny political participation grounded in religion as such is said to be at odds with the spirit of freedom of religion. At the same time, the separation of religion and state is a principle that warns against the state favoring a particular faith, and the wariness toward a religious organization and a party drawing too close to each other is also derived from this principle. The two ideals of freedom and separation cannot stand on either one alone; they coexist while harboring tension.

Postwar Japan, having passed through the bitter experience of prewar State Shinto, chose the path of severing state from religion. For that very reason, when faith becomes involved in politics, people react sensitively, overlaying upon it the shadow of the past. The long controversy surrounding Komeito was an expression of that sensitivity as well. What matters is neither condemning a particular organization nor defending it unconditionally, but that society ceaselessly continues to seek an appropriate point of balance between the two principles of freedom of religion and the separation of religion and state. That point of balance is not fixed; it is questioned anew with the times.

We have viewed as calmly as we could the half-century in which faith held seats in postwar Japan. Yet the shadow cast by the bond between religion and politics does not remain only within Japan. Around the same time, in places all over the world, faith was once again being pushed to the forefront of politics. Yet the bond between religion and politics cast its long shadow beyond Japan as well, at times a deep one.