Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
This chapter draws on various opinions and activities of young people who
were members of the Soka Gakkai Youth Division (YD). Mostly in their
twenties and a few of them in their thirties, this chapter starts with
ve eth-
nographies of meetings and canvassing activities of young people living in
Kita-ku, North Tokyo and Hachioji, West Tokyo, the location of Soka Uni-
versity. Many of the young people who were campaigning for Komeito during
the national elections of 2003 and 2004 I met through my own initial con-
tacts, or through the United Nations Research Club (UNRC), a student club
at Soka University. Striking was their underlying quest to secure policies and
politics that show respect for human dignity, promote equality, safeguard
social welfare, and warrant wider issues of peace and human rights. This was,
as expected, not an easy or straightforward task to achieve in reality and was
a process often
filled with conundrums. Young people engage in initiating
conversations about politics
first among themselves, then with their friends,
family and acquaintances. To do that requires a certain amount of courage, as
well as trust in the politicians they are promoting. There may be a certain
amount of conformism in that these young people direct their political and
social activities into one party endorsed by their religious group, but they also
present a discursive challenge to homogenising national discourses about
politics and history.
The Young Men
s Division pledging political commitment
'
It was Sunday morning, two weeks before the November 2003 election and I
was attending a meeting to kick off
cial election period in Kita-ku, an
area where they were campaigning for Ota Akihiro, the politician who was to
become head of Komeito between 2006 and 2009. It was a Young Men
the o
s
Division (YMD) meeting attended by approximately 40 young men, held in
what is known as a family or private kaikan (centre). A family kaikan is
usually a part of a privately owned house that has been made available to
Soka Gakkai members to use for activities of members in that area. The
'
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