Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
political participation
Concerning themselves with humanitarian issues was essential to the active
young Buddhists in this topic. From a wider level of analysis, their support
for Komeito has been for a party mostly successful at implementing a number
of its policies and in modifying some of the key Liberal Democratic Party
'
s
(LDP) policies during the 10 years of the coalition (1999
2009). Some pre-
vious supporters who were more strictly ideologically driven tended to see the
coalition years as a period of too many compromises, as the media kept
pointing out. Komeito
-
erent from previous decades, which
some interpreted as its desire to maintain power. Less-active members of
Soka Gakkai viewing the situation in this way may have stopped voting for
Komeito during this time. Many active Soka Gakkai members were also
struggling with the tension of being in a coalition, particularly poignant at the
time of the Iraq invasion in 2003 and the dispatch of the Self-Defence Forces
(SDF) to Iraq in 2004. However, among active supporters most continued
their support.
Outsiders, including prominent political commentators, often concluded
that Komeito is a religious party and in politics to protect Soka Gakkai,
which is seen to have made it more vulnerable to compromise with the LDP.
The content of Komeito
'
s position was di
s political agenda shows no evidence of it being a
religious party, nor that it functions to protect Soka Gakkai as an organisa-
tion. Neither have I seen such a demand from the organisation. Yet there are
clearly indirect demands from its supporters of a more general nature, a
demand for politicians to stay true to their stated objectives. However, there is
no
'
for them to be working for Soka Gakkai, whatever that would
actually mean. Periodically someone in the public sphere in Japan, whether a
politician or political commentator, raises their fear about the in
'
demand
'
uence on or
even control of politics by one religious group. Unless one disagrees with the
content of the voices of active young Soka Gakkai members and Komeito
supporters (their call for protecting human rights in the broadest sense cov-
ering environmental protection, social welfare, peace, gender/ethnic equality),
it is hard to see how their political agenda could lead to the control of one
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