Abe’s murder triggered a months-long media frenzy that magnified moral panic about perceived “cult” influences on Japanese politics, raising concerns about religion in the public sphere to levels not seen since the sarin gas attacks on the Tokyo subways by the apocalyptic group Aum Shinrikyō nearly 30 years earlier. And while media attention shifted to a slush fund scandal from the end of 2023, Prime Minister Kishida Fumio and his embattled Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) labored under the specter of the Abe murder and its motivation. The Kishida cabinet never recovered the popularity it enjoyed up to July 2022. Kishida announced that he was stepping down in September 2024 at the end of his term as party leader. He was replaced by Ishiba Shigeru, who led the LDP into a snap election that saw the party drop dramatically from a holding a majority to leading a minority government coalition. Kishida will be remembered as the prime minister synonymous with Abe’s assassination and furor over the Unification Church, and public anger over political ties to the religion continues to undermine confidence in the LDP, a party that has dominated Japanese politics since the end of World War II.
Panic over religion in politics and public life is nothing new in Japan. Concern about maintaining divides between religion and government guaranteed by Japan’s 1947 constitution have surfaced repeatedly since the end of the Pacific War, and the category “religion” has generally elicited ambivalence, at best, since its introduction to the Japanese lexicon in the mid-nineteenth century. Today, Japan ranks as one of the world’s least religious countries, with only around one in five survey respondents likely to affirm that they have religious faith. Nonetheless, there are more than 180,000 organizations registered with the Japanese government as “religious juridical persons.” And numerous religions and religion-affiliated lobby organizations continue a long tradition of contributing in significant ways to candidate selection, electioneering, policymaking, and other core aspects of Japan’s political process.
Soka Gakkai and Komeito: Religious Activists Secure a Lasting Place in Japanese Politics
One religion and the political party it founded are by far the most influential in this regard. This is the lay Buddhist organization Soka Gakkai and its affiliated party Komeito, which has been allied to the LDP at the national level since 1999. Soka Gakkai, which began in the 1930s as an educational reform society and developed into a community dedicated to the teachings of the medieval Buddhist reformer Nichiren (1222-1282), now comprises approximately 2% of the Japanese population. The religion began its official overseas expansion in 1960, and today Soka Gakkai International (SGI) claims several million members in 192 countries and territories. Going by convert numbers alone, Soka Gakkai is likely Japan’s most successful religious export.
Beginning with a few thousand adherent families, the group converted millions in Japan from the 1950s into the 1970s when it combined aggressive proselytizing; an exclusivist and accessible doctrine and ritual practice that promise this-worldly and transcendent results; singular devotion to its charismatic leaders, especially its third president, Ikeda Daisaku (1928-2023); and energetic participation in electioneering. These elements fused into a heady mix that inspired the group’s largely socially disenfranchised membership to build a comprehensive range of institutions that make Soka Gakkai’s presence felt in business, education, media, and most visibly in politics.
Soka Gakkai’s successful expansion came at the expense of a positive public image. Today, the religion is mostly made up of second- to fourth-generation adherents who are less intense about missionizing than their first-generation relatives, and its leaders now engage diplomatically across cultural, political, and religious divides. Nonetheless, Gakkai members in Japan continue to be cultivated to treat electioneering on behalf of Komeito and its allies as a staple component of their regular practice.
Gakkai member electioneering consistently rekindles public distrust of Soka Gakkai and Komeito. But despite persistent accusations by its religious and political rivals that Komeito operates as Soka Gakkai’s political wing and poses the threat of theocratic rule by virtue of its presence in government, there is no evidence that the party pursues religious aims. Soka Gakkai leaders founded Komeito in 1964 in keeping with Nichiren Buddhist imperatives, but the religion and party formally split in 1970. Since then, Komeito has clearly transformed into a “normal” political party, in the sense that it seeks votes by promoting policies that appeal to voters. In Komeito’s case, this means advocating for reforms in child support, education, and other social welfare matters that concern its primary constituency: homemakers in Soka Gakkai’s Women’s Division.
Gakkai members, particularly women, mobilized as Japan’s most potent vote-gathering bloc from the 1950s, when the religion ran independent candidates a decade prior to Komeito’s founding. After the Abe assassination, Japan’s media raised outcry against LDP politicians who were reportedly buoyed to office by votes from the Unification Church—most notably Inoue Yoshiyuki, former aide to Abe Shinzō, who received an estimated 70,000 to 90,000 votes from the Unification faithful in his successful July 2022 bid for a seat in the Japanese Diet’s Upper House. But these are small numbers by Gakkai standards. Common wisdom holds that the religion’s adherents have reliably generated an estimated 10,000 to 20,000 votes in every national-level district where a Komeito candidate or LDP ally ran for office. Given that many Diet seats are won by narrow margins, Komeito has punched significantly above its weight as the junior partner in the coalition government. Without its Gakkai supporters, Komeito’s LDP partner would likely not have gained majorities in either the Lower or Upper Houses of Japan’s parliament during the quarter century of the LDP-Komeito coalition agreement.
Religion as Soft Power: Soka Gakkai Influences Japan’s Security Posture and Facilitates Relations with China
Networks comprising religions and those who intersect with them vie for influence within Japan’s LDP-Komeito ruling coalition. On the LDP side, numerous nationalist ideologues inform lawmakers in the Diet and in subnational legislatures. These include the unincorporated lobby association Nippon Kaigi (Japan Conference), which counts many national-level LDP politicians as signatories and hosts regular study meetings within the National Diet; the Association of Shinto Shrines and its political wing, the Shinto Association of Spiritual Leadership; and a host of Buddhist, Christian, Shinto, and other religious groups—including, until recently, the Unification Church—that seek policy influence. All these organizations are vociferously opposed to Soka Gakkai and Komeito. But it is Soka Gakkai that built an electoral strength unmatched by any other religion. Or, indeed, any other organization in Japan.
One area that receives consistent attention is Komeito’s capacity as the “opposition within the government.” Komeito operates as a brake against LDP aspirations for constitutional revision and to otherwise reign in its coalition partner’s most hawkish impulses. The party was founded on a platform of absolute pacifism, but its leaders have reversed most of its original positions on national defense to vote with the LDP in favor of collective self-defense and other radical reinterpretations of the postwar Japanese constitution’s “peace clause” (Article 9), which requires Japan to reject war as a means to resolve international disputes. And Komeito went along with the Kishida government’s plan to increase defense spending to 2% of GDP by 2027 to meet a NATO benchmark.
But analysts credit Komeito with stalling LDP plans to revise the constitution itself. In April 2012, the LDP issued a proposed draft amendment that stalled out in the face of Komeito opposition, and subsequent constitution revision efforts by nationalist activists have run into the same LDP-Komeito coalition dilemma. Revisionist aspirations have stalled because Komeito has long been beholden to a Gakkai membership that holds its pacifist origins in high esteem. In turn, the LDP has been beholden to support from Komeito’s voter base. The net result is religious influence, exerted from grassroots adherents and felt at the highest and most sensitive levels of the Japanese electoral process, that reinforces Japan’s reluctance to transform its Self-Defense Forces into a “normal” military urged by the United States government. The American government would like nothing more than greater Japanese participation in Indo-Pacific defense postures against China. Komeito, and its Gakkai supporters, have made this difficult.
But the Gakkai and Komeito presence in government also yields soft power dividends that benefit the United States and conservative politicians in Japan. One beneficial result is ties between upper-level Komeito politicians and Gakkai leaders and officials in the People’s Republic of China (PRC) that have sustained back channels for communication between the two governments. From 1971, negotiations between the Komeito politician Takeiri Yoshikatsu and Premier Zhou Enlai produced the template for diplomatic normalization between Japan and the PRC. Ties were also solidified through 1974 meetings between Zhou and Soka Gakkai’s third president Ikeda Daisaku, and also through educational exchanges; Cheng Yonghua, China’s ambassador to Japan from 2010 to 2019, studied at Soka University in Japan in 1975, one of six Chinese university students who were the first to come to Japan after diplomatic normalization. One result of these now generations-old connections is that Komeito politicians regularly represent Japan as governmental envoys to China. Both the party and its founding religion have preserved communication between the two countries even as tensions rise.
Changes on the Horizon: Religious Transformations Mean Political Transformations
There are shifts underway within Soka Gakkai that call into question its vote-gathering future and its affiliated party’s potential influence on domestic policymaking and international affairs. Like organizations of all types in Japan, the religion faces steep demographic decline in the wake of Japan’s plummeting birthrate. The Gakkai’s diminishing electioneering capacity is evident in recent national elections. Most notable is the general election of October 2024, which saw Komeito’s proportional representation tier vote count drop to approximately 5.96 million; in the 2021 election, Komeito garnered over 7.1 million votes. In the July 2022 Upper House race, Komeito gathered 6.11 million votes for the proportional representation tier, which was then the lowest count since the party partnered with the LDP in 1999. This is a trend we can expect to continue.
The religion now faces a future without Ikeda Daisaku, who died at the age of 95 in November 2023. Gakkai members have for generations fostered an affective mentor-disciple bond with Ikeda, treating vote-gathering for the party he founded as obligation to repay their cherished teacher. Younger members coming of age now—and there are fewer children born to Gakkai families than in previous generations—will have no memory of Ikeda, who disappeared from the public eye in 2010. It is also evident that young adherents do not dedicate themselves to the party, or the religion, with the same fervor as their parents and grandparents. Even if the party can attract more support in elections to come, a future of drastically reduced Komeito vote counts seems certain.
Ikeda's death ushered in a new era for millions of Soka Gakkai disciples, and Yamaguchi Natsuo, the long-term Komeito leader, ended 15 years as head of the party in September 2024. His successor, Ishii Kei’ichi, lost his race in the October 2024 election after only one month at the party helm. Whether a new, younger generation of religious and political leaders will retain communication channels and memories of friendship between Japan and China fostered by Gakkai leaders and Komeito politicians remains to be seen.
A change in Soka Gakkai’s electoral power and resulting policy impact may dramatically transform the makeup of the Japanese government. However, it is too soon to count out Soka Gakkai, and Komeito. The LDP is beleaguered and needs all the electoral support its longstanding coalition partner can offer. And even as Soka Gakkai’s vote-gathering strength diminishes, the religion will remain one of Japan’s most effective electioneering organizations. Indeed, in the post-Abe age, even as public acrimony remains elevated and demographic change shapes institutional dynamics, we can expect Soka Gakkai and Komeito to remain pivotal forces. And for religion, as a whole, to remain a potent force within Japanese politics.
Editor’s Note: This publication was written as part of the Geopolitics of Religious Soft Power project, a research initiative of Georgetown University’s Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs. This article arises from a partnership between the project and the United States Institute of Peace focused on understanding how the geopolitics of religion shapes peace and conflict dynamics in particular regional and country settings. The statements made and views expressed are solely the responsibility of the respective author(s).
