Komeito
Komeito, formerly New Komeito and commonly referred to as simply Komei, is a political party in Japan affiliated with the Soka Gakkai religious movement. It is generally considered centrist. From 1999 to 2009 and from 2012 to 2025, it served in government as the junior coalition partner of the Liberal Democratic Party.
Komeito was founded by the leader of Soka Gakkai, Daisaku Ikeda, in 1964. In 1993 and 1994, Komeito joined the non-LDP governments of Morihiro Hosokawa and Tsutomu Hata. With the collapse of the Hata government in 1994, Komeito split into the New Kōmei Party and Kōmei; the New Kōmei Party merged with other smaller opposition parties to establish the New Frontier Party. After the dissolution of the NFP in 1997, some former New Kōmei Party established the New Peace Party, which merged with Kōmei in 1998 to establish the New Komeito. In 1999, the party entered into a coalition with LDP, serving in the government until the coalition lost power in 2009. In 2012, the coalition regained power. In 2014, the party changed its English name back to Komeito. In 2025, Komeito formally withdrew from the ruling coalition, ending its 26-year alliance with the LDP. In 2026, it announced its partial merger with the Constitutional Democratic Party to form the Centrist Reform Alliance.
A self-proclaimed party of "humanitarian socialism", Komeito has been described as being closely affiliated with Soka Gakkai. During its alliance with the LDP, Komeito acted as a moderating force over security and military policies. In foreign policy, the party advocates for a more pacifist diplomacy and closer relations with China. Tetsuo Saito has been the president of the party since 9 November 2024. Komeito currently has 24 elected deputies in the House of Representatives and 21 deputies in the House of Councillors.
History
Opposition before 1993
Komeito began as the Political Federation for Clean Government in 1961, but held its inaugural convention as Komeito on 17 November 1964, when it was founded by the leader of Soka Gakkai, Daisaku Ikeda. The three characters 公明党 have the approximate meanings of "public/government", "light/brightness", and "political party". The combination "kōmei" is usually taken to mean "justice". Komeito's predecessor party was formed in 1962, but it had begun in 1954 as the Kōmei Political League. It lasted until it merged with the NKP in 1998.In 1957, a group of Young Men's Division members campaigning for a Soka Gakkai candidate in an Osaka Upper House by-election were arrested for distributing money, cigarettes, and caramels at supporters' residences, in violation of election law, and on July 3 of that year, at the beginning of an event memorialized as the "Osaka Incident", Daisaku Ikeda was arrested in Osaka. He was taken into custody in his capacity as Soka Gakkai's Youth Division Chief of Staff for overseeing activities that constituted violations of election law. He spent two weeks in jail and appeared in court forty-eight times before he was cleared of all charges in January 1962.
In 1968, fourteen Soka Gakkai members were convicted of forging absentee ballots in Shinjuku, and eight were sentenced to prison for electoral fraud. In the 1960s it was widely criticized for violating the separation of church and state, and in February 1970 all three major Japanese newspapers printed editorials demanding that the party reorganize. It eventually broke apart based on promises to segregate from Soka Gakkai. In the 1980s, Shimbun Akahata discovered that many Soka Gakkai members were rewarding acquaintances with presents in return for Komeito votes and that Okinawa residents had changed their addresses to elect Komeito politicians.
Anti-LDP coalition government: 1993–1994
Kōmeitō joined the Hosokawa and Hata anti-LDP coalition cabinets in 1993 and 1994. After the collapse of the anti-LDP and anti-JCP governments and the electoral and campaign finance reforms of 1994, the Kōmeitō split in December 1994: The "New Kōmei Party" joined the New Frontier Party a few days later in an attempt to unify the splintered opposition.The other group, Kōmei, continued to exist as a separate party. After the dissolution of the NFP in December 1997, former Kōmeitō members from the NFP founded two new groups: the "New Peace Party" and the "Dawn Club" in the House of Councillors, but some ex-Kōmeitō politicians such as Shōzō Azuma followed Ichirō Ozawa into the Liberal Party. The Reimei Club merged into the New Peace Party a few weeks later in January 1998. Finally, in November 1998, Kōmei and New Peace Party merged to re-establish Kōmeitō. The Japan Echo alleged in 1999 that Soka Gakkai distributed fliers to local branches describing how to abuse the jūminhyō residence registration system in order to generate a large number of votes for Komeito candidates in specific districts.
Coalition with the Liberal Democratic Party: 1999–2025
The current more moderate and centrist party was formed in 1998, in a merger of Kōmei and the New Peace Party. Since then it has joined coalition with the ruling Liberal Democratic Party, which needs Komeito to maintain a majority in the Diet, and did well in the 2000 and 2001 parliamentary elections. The LDP-Liberal coalition expanded to include the New Komeito Party in October 1999. New Komeito has been a coalition partner in the Government of Japan since 1999. As such, New Komeito supported a change to Japan's "no-war constitution" in order for Japan to deploy troops in support of the 2003 invasion of Iraq.In the 2003 Japanese general election and 2004 Japanese House of Councillors election, the NKP did well, thanks to an extremely committed and well-organized voter base coming from Soka Gakkai. The party shares its support base with the LDP, made up of white-collar bureaucrats and rural populations, but also gained support from religious leaders. On 27 July 2005, NKP's Secretary-General said that his party would consider forming a coalition government with the Democratic Party of Japan if the DPJ gained a majority in the House of Representatives. On 8 August 2005, then-Prime Minister and the president of LDP Junichiro Koizumi dissolved the Lower House and called for a general election, due to the rejection on some of the members of LDP for efforts to privatize Japan Post. The incumbent LDP-New Komeito coalition won a large majority in the 2005 general election. Natsuo Yamaguchi became the party's leader on 8 September 2009 after the party and their coalition partner LDP suffered a major defeat in the 2009 general election, become part of the opposition for the first time since 1999. New Komeito lost ten seats, including that of party leader Akihiro Ota and general secretary Kazuo Kitagawa. On 8 September 2009, Yamaguchi replaced Ota as president of New Komeito.
In the 2012 Japanese general election, the LDP/Komeito coalition secured a supermajority and came back into government. The former party chief Akihiro Ota is currently Minister of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism. The party also gained seats in the general election in 2014. In September 2014 the party changed its English name from New Komeito back to Komeito. In July 2015, Komeito backed Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's push to revise the Constitution through the Legislation for Peace and Security in order to "give Japan's military limited powers to fight in foreign conflicts. The principal aims of the bills were to allow Japan's Self-Defense Forces to come to the aid of allied nations under attack, to expand their scope to support international peacekeeping operations, and to allow for Japan to take on a greater share of security responsibilities as part of the US-Japan Alliance. On March 11, 2019, a project team of Komeito submitted proposals to Foreign Minister Taro Kono for an international agreement to regulate robotic weapons, calling on Japan to build global consensus for a "political declaration or a code of conduct, within the framework of the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons".