Introduction - Religion and Politics in Contemporary Japan - page 9

their political involvement. A general lack of access is partly to blame for the
poor research outputs, but the e ect of the media ' s negative representation of

new religions has had an enduring in uence on the felt need to defend beliefs

and actions against heavy media stereotyping, and outright prejudice and
persecution in the tabloid press (Gamble and Watanabe 2004). Despite an
active participation in both civic and political life by many such organisa-
tions, the common perception remains that all new religions are somewhat
undemocratic anomalies in the modern nation-state, having arisen primarily
as a reaction to and against modernity and Westernisation. For instance,
Davis (1991: 801) places Soka Gakkai within a cluster of fundamentalist
attitudes, and its success as being due to coercion and threats that have won
'

(cf. Johnson 1995: 238). Other more recent
studies represent the political support for Komeito as primarily the activities
of unthinking religious foot soldiers, instructed by authoritative social hier-
archies of leadership (cf. Eto and Hichiri 2003; Yamada 2004; Sado 2005).
Yet, would threats and coercion make millions of young people engage in
religious practice and politics? The underlying assumptions about religious
adherents as people who are particularly susceptible to threats from someone
in a position of power are under investigation in this topic. When Nakane
(1970: 61) says

the sect an enormous following '

without consciousness of ranking, life could not be carried on
smoothly in Japan, for rank is the social norm on which Japanese life is
based

'

'

, and takes such ranking as the way to understand new religious groups,
I pause for thought. It is di cult to understand a popular social movement

such as that of the huge grassroots support for Komeito as a search for neo-
Confucian benevolence from superiors. Why this political participation is so
di erent from a search for a way to manifest the Lockean notions of

inalienable rights as citizens and human beings is not well answered. Expla-
nations such as,

cooperation and harmony are the law of nature in tradi-
tional Japanese thought, a view that permeates virtually every aspect of
Japanese culture today

'

(Hoye 1999: 25), do not in fact reveal much about the
political involvement of the case under study. Western models of social
democracy wherein political parties and civically engaged citizens supposedly
compete based on di

'

erent aspirations for the good society seem more com-
patible with what young people in Soka Gakkai take as the basis for their
political involvement. That they are not considered in this way is also partly
due to the way politics in Japan have more generally been taken to lack
essential ingredients of democracy.

Representations of politics
The general opinion is that democracy has successfully taken root in Japan.
Many political scientists 7 focus on the relationships between the bureaucracy
that runs the ministries, the business elites who have or want public funds,
and the connections between politicians and these various institutions and
corporations, and have a practice of untrustworthy mutual back-scratching