Wednesday, July 16, 2008

Additions to Parliamentary Group Information

I've added some more links, all of them covering LDP faction membership.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Thank you again. We will do our best to translate what we can and create some sort of guide to further research. Your help has been invaluable. I am not sure you achieve your goal of smashing the righwing colossus goal, but you do add to scholarship and understanding of the Diet. We wonder how you (or others in Japan) weight these groups, as clearly some are more important than others.
We look forward to your further posts on this facet of Japanese politics. And we will send you a link when we feel we are at a point of releasing our translation publicly.
Keep up the good work!

Jun Okumura said...

I look at politics from two angles; the political game, and statecraft. Factions have significance for the political game, while the others mainly engage in statecraft. The scope of the latter as well as their effectiveness varies widely. My guess is that the groups with narrower focuses tend to be more influential with regard to their objectives.

New groups with nationalist/right-wing/conservative objectives pop up from time to time, while the old ones never seem to disappear, even as their relevance diminishes with time. I know too little about the groups and their members to make a guess on the reasons for this. What I do know is that the conventional wisdom mong people with only casual interest in Japan that there is a monolithic, aggressive right-wing political movement on the rise here is off the mark and harmful.