I wrote this previous post on parliamentary groups as part of my efforts to dispel what I see as the myth of the right-wing nativist monolith. Here, I’m making the following appeal to respond to a broader demand for such reliable online information that the post revealed.
It is very difficult to find any online primary-source information regarding parliamentary groups, much less their membership lists. Here are a few lists that are available in Japanese. If you know of any others, please put them here; I’ll be happy to post them as a list of links. All the better if you can point us to already-available compilations. Official group websites are also welcome, even if they do not have membership lists.
Shinto Seiji Renmei (literally, Shinto Politics League; it gives itself the more generic English name Shinto Association of Spiritual Leadership): Click through to find the membership list for the parliamentary supporter group.
21 Seiki Rincho (literally, 21st Century Extraordinary Administrative Reform Council; it gives itself the acronym SECJ but I don’t know what it stands for): Click through to find the membership list for the parliamentary group for its spiritual offshoot Sentaku.
Tadashii Nippon wo Tsukuru Kai (literally, Group to Create the True Japan): This appears to be a fairly exclusive conservative group.
Seiwa Seisaku Kenkyuukai: The largest LDP habatsu, or faction; also the only one that has an official website.
I’ve found other caucuses that have websites or belong to larger movements that have their own websites. Unfortunately, none of them have parliamentary membership lists. I’m sure there are offline sources for this kind of information, though I’ve never bothered to look for them.
ADD 16 July: More faction-related resources
The Japanese-language Wikipedia page has pages for all LDP factions, each of which has a list of all the faction members. More convenient are the following charts listing all LDP members by faction, including independents. The webpages had been out of order for a while, but have come back online.
House of Representatives
House of Councilors
Taku Yamazaki’s homepage. It lists all the Diet members of the Yamazaki faction, complete with links to their homepages.
Nikai faction home page. actually a subsection of Toshihiro Nikai’s homepage. It gives the bios of all its members (two of them are not Diet members), with links to their individual homepages where available.
Annual group photos; Koumura faction. Apparently a repository for photos taken by a Koumura supporter at annual meetings of the Koumura faction. Three of the members as of 10 April 2008 were not Diet members.
2 comments:
Your efforts are much appreciated.
We will try our hand at some translations.
You are welcome. If you put the information on a webpage, I'll be happy to put a link to it on the sidebar here.
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