Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
However, Nami still had another chance to get someone to vote. She had been
a frequent shopper (since she often bought gifts for Alexandra), as had I, at
another second-hand store. This was a children
s shop and was not far from the
second-hand shop where Yamada had worked. Some time before the November
election, during one of those shopping trips, Nami had fallen into conversa-
tion with a not particularly friendly woman in her mid-forties who worked in
the shop. Nami had ended up talking to the woman about Komeito and,
apparently, the women had voted for Komeito because she speci
'
cally came
up to Nami to tell her so some weeks after the election. Therefore, now (July
2004) just a week before the Upper House election, Nami wanted to ask the
woman if she was considering voting for Komeito again. When we got to the
shop, the woman was there. Nami was again at a loss for words. As she hes-
itatingly asked if the woman remembered her (the woman looking expres-
sionless), Nami continued talking, telling her how she had just graduated
from Soka University and was now working in another part of Tokyo. She
continued to try to make conversation by telling the woman how I had also
been an international student there and introducing me into the process,
trying to raise some interest in her alma mater. The woman did not seem
impressed or perhaps was simply in a bad mood. When the eventual question
came as to whether she would consider supporting Komeito again this time,
she just nodded and continued her task of clearing the desk. It did not look
promising.
No detailed information about young members of Komeito was available from
the Komeito Headquarters apart from an estimate of 59,000 out of 400,000
Komeito members being people in their twenties and thirties. Komeito did
not have any centralised database with information on age, sex, professional
status, etc. For data protection reasons they probably would have been unable
to hand me a list of their members had one existed. Meeting Komeito sup-
porters was a case of being introduced through contacts I had and continued
to make during the year of 2003/04 and again in 2009 and 2010. Talking to
young Soka Gakkai members who supported Komeito, what immediately
struck me was that they never mentioned membership of Komeito. This was
quite di
s (1981: 52) description of young women eagerly
waiting for the day they would turn 20 so that they could become o
erent to Pharr
'
cial
members of the party. This may have been the case in the 1980s, but it was
not the case now. When I asked Soka Gakkai members if they were also
members of Komeito, few had any idea about what I was talking. When I
asked young people who I was observing to be actively supporting Komeito if
they or young people they knew in their district paid a fee to Komeito (as an
indicator of membership), the answer was
'
for sure no one pays any money to
'
Komeito
(zettai ni okane wo harau hito wa inai). Even Kamio, who worked
for Komeito, seemed unaware of who exactly was a member of Komeito in
Search WWH ::
Custom Search