Aspiration for the good society - Religion and Politics in Contemporary Japan - page 95

terms of the personal playing out in the public and vice versa and preconceived
ideas are resisted, transformed but also reinforced in some cases. We have
heard, and shall hear again, that it takes courage to speak about politics. The
positive self-perception that entwines with the historically negative public
image of religion in general and their religious and political participation in
particular frame interactions. There are members who give up their faith in
the face of tabloid smear campaigns (and certainly inactive members who
have little contact with other Soka Gakkai members or read Soka Gakkai
materials may be in

uenced), but most active members instead challenge such
perceptions. This is particularly the case during an election, when their aim is
to ask people to take political action, i.e. to vote.
Owing to both loyalty to Soka Gakkai and the sense of responsibility or
ownership towards the political process they learn to have, many young
people make an e ort to understand current political issues, from calls to

change the Constitution to the challenge of the huge pension de cit. While

discussions among them, for the most part, seemed focused on how Komeito
envisions policies, understanding all the intricate details of, for example, one
of the hottest topics during the elections of 2003 and 2004, the new pension plan,
which was Komeito

s design, did require considerable knowledge of economics.
Even politicians seemed confused about the best way forward as this compli-
cated system involved a general state pension, a pension based on income,
and various other private pensions and social security systems. Komeito

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2004 Hundred-year Plan pension proposal set out to overcome the huge

pension de ts. The proposal

was adopted by the Diet (the Japanese legislature) before the July 2004 Upper
House election but with various revisions due to pressure from the LDP to
further lower bene

cit by increasing premiums and lowering bene

ts for pensioners. This was naturally unpopular among
soon-to-retire workers, who would see a decrease in their pension earnings. 7
Judging from the media reports, and people like Yamada, the merits of these
reforms were being questioned, although no one, including opposition parties,
had a viable alternative to prevent the whole system from collapsing. Sup-
porters in the July 2004 election expressed the di culty of getting people to

vote for Komeito as there were no attractive issues on which to focus: Everyone

is upset about Iraq with the dispatch of SDF and the pension plan, both of
which Komeito supported

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, as one supporter expressed it.
Conspicuously, just one day after the new pension proposal was accepted in
the Diet, politicians from both the ruling camp and opposition parties were
found to have failed to pay into the already depleted pension fund. This
caused an outpouring of negative media reporting, which greatly undermined
trust in politicians overall. Politicians, including cabinet ministers and the
leader of the main opposition, Minshut - , Kan Naoto, 8 were forced to resign.
That Kan, as the person who brought up this issue as a way of discrediting
the ruling parties (cf. Asahi Shinbun, 29/04/2004), had also failed to pay his
pension premiums was perhaps ironic, but it highlighted faults in the system
as well. 9 On the other hand, the many LDP politicians who denied public

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