Commentary | Levi McLaughlin, Sanae Takaichi and Japan’s Uncertain Politics/Religion Future
Local-Level Religious Activists Recently Upended Japan’s Political Order
Japan ranks among the least religious countries in the world—according to recent survey data, as many as 80% or 90% of respondents in Japan deny any religious affiliation. This is complicated: most Japanese people don’t identify with religion. At the same time, many carry out rituals at shrines and temples—sometimes casually, and sometimes with gravity—and otherwise engage in activities and profess beliefs that an observer could code as religious.
But while people in Japan are liable to eschew religion when they’re asked to affirm their personal convictions, religions and religion-affiliated groups exert a profound influence on Japanese politics. A dramatic reshuffling of long-standing political alliances and a reformulation of the country’s government following the selection last month of Japan’s first woman prime minister, Sanae Takaichi, offers insight into how religion shapes Japan’s political past, present, and future. Upheaval accompanying Takaichi’s rise to PM reveals that Japan is a country, like others, where we need to attend to religion to understand its politics.
Japan’s Fraught Religion/Politics Nexus
For a country with a populace that is mostly leery about being called religious, Japan certainly has a lot of religious organizations. Japan’s population is estimated at ~123 million people. It is home to approximately 80,000 shrines within Shinto, a practice of venerating deities (called kami) that is understood as the native tradition of the Japanese people. Japan also has in the neighborhood of 75,000 Buddhist temples that represent a variety of traditions (Nichiren, Pure Land, Shingon, Tendai, Zen, and others). Though only about one in five people in Japan are comfortable self-identifying as religious, Japan’s Agency for Cultural Affairs counts ~67% of the population as Shinto affiliates and about 64% on the books at Buddhist temples. In other words, about two thirds of people in Japan are formally parishioners of both a Shinto shrine and a Buddhist temple.
There is plenty of other religion in Japan as well. Only about 1% of the country is Christian, but there is an outsized Christian presence in Japan, as there is across Asia. Many people in Japan have graduated from a school founded by a Catholic order or Protestant denomination, 7 of 35 prime ministers since 1945 have been Christian, Christianity-affiliated healthcare and social welfare institutions comprise a significant percentage of care facilities in Japan, and Christian-style weddings remain popular. Judaism has a tiny presence in Japan, there are a small number of Hindu and Sikh temples, and there is a larger, and growing, presence of Islam, driven largely by a steady flow of migrants from Southeast Asia. It is now the fastest-growing religion in Japan. Indeed, Japanese politicians have recently sought electoral advantage by factoring in locals’ fear of Muslim requirements for burying the dead, which contrast with the country’s Buddhism-derived cremation custom.
Japan is also home to many so-called “new religions.” These are groups—some Shinto-affiliated, others derived from Buddhism or Christianity, and many which combine traditions and propose novel teachings and practices—founded in the last two centuries. Most of these are not brand new, but they are newer than Japan’s temple-based Buddhist denominations, some of which originated with Buddhism’s arrival in Japan from Korea and China starting from the 500s, and Shinto, which has some shrines that date to almost two millennia ago.
For many, “new religions” serves as a euphemism for “cult.” It’s a category that reliably sparks high levels of antipathy in Japan, just as it does in other countries. Animosity for new religions is amplified by the fact that organizations bearing this label sway Japanese politics.
Japan’s Generation-Old Religion-Dependent Governing Coalition Ended in October
Religious engagement with politics in Japan is a particularly sensitive topic. Concern with the religion/politics divide finds purchase in Japan’s Constitution, which came into effect in 1947. This document is unusual for several reasons. It is history’s longest-ever unamended constitution, and it is famous for its Article 9, the “peace clause,” put in place by the American victors after World War II who drafted the constitution to ensure that Japan never again resort to war as a means of resolving international disputes. Japan’s 1947 Constitution also has two distinct articles, 20 and 89, which set out divisions between religion and government. These were included to guarantee that governmentally mandated civic reverence for a divine emperor—Japan’s imperial sovereign is understood within a Shinto context to be a living kami descended from the sun goddess Amaterasu Ōmikami—never again have a place in Japanese politics.
Given these constitutional strictures, is perhaps surprising that Japan was mostly governed for the past 26 years by a coalition strongly influenced by religious organizations. From 1999 until October 2025, except for a period in opposition from 2009 to 2012, Japan was headed by an unlikely alliance of two parties, both of which sustain significant religious ties.
These are the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP)—socially conservative, focused on big business and consolidating power in governmental administration, dominant at all levels of Japanese government, and affiliated with influential Shinto-linked groups and other conservative religious actors. The LDP partnered for more than a quarter century with Komeito, a largely social welfare-oriented party established by the lay Buddhist “new religion” Soka Gakkai. Founded in the 1930s, Soka Gakkai (known in the United States and other countries as Soka Gakkai International, or SGI) exploded in the decades after WWII into Japan’s largest modern religion. It is also likely Japan’s most successful religious export, in terms of conversion numbers. In Japan, its millions of converts became notorious for their hard-core proselytizing, their demands that adherents reject all other faiths (which is unusual in Japanese Buddhism), reverence for the Gakkai’s charismatic leadership, and for their successful forays into electoral politics.
For generations, members of Soka Gakkai have been cultivated to gather votes for Komeito and its political allies as part of their regular practice. In Japan’s political world, this is a big deal, because no other organization has matched Gakkai vote-gathering power. Soka Gakkai’s Women’s Division, in particular, has long dominated as Japan’s most potent electoral force.
Gakkai support translated into electoral dominance by the LDP-Komeito coalition. In exchange for votes guaranteed by Soka Gakkai members, the LDP granted Komeito a place in government and protection for its affiliated religion from legal and political attacks. In turn, Komeito enjoyed a modest capacity to influence policymaking. For Gakkai members, who hold dear Komeito’s founding on a pacifist platform, this meant ensuring that the LDP did not egregiously violate the terms of Article 9. During the coalition years, Komeito politicians touted their capacity to act as a brake on the LDP’s most intransigent objectives, most notably their conservative partner’s long-cherished goal to revise or replace Japan’s 1947 Constitution and establish a robust Japanese military force.
A Political “Middle-Aged Divorce”
Commentators are calling the LDP-Komeito split a jukunen rikon, or “middle-aged divorce,” referring to couples who end their marriages in midlife. There might be something to an empty nester divorce metaphor: both the LDP and Komeito have been shedding vote counts in recent elections. Their kids, in effect, appear to have grown up and moved away.
The LDP had seen dismal support rates after former Prime Minister Shinzō Abe was assassinated in July 2022 by a gunman who targeted him for maintaining ties with the Unification Church, a highly controversial new religious organization that sought to advance conservative causes in cooperation with LDP politicians. The party saw its support plummet further from 2023, when a series of financial scandals related to LDP slush funds came to light. Meanwhile, generational change within Soka Gakkai, the death of the religion’s Honorary President Ikeda Daisaku in November 2023—whom devotees regard as their primary mentor—alongside member fatigue with supporting a corrupt LDP partner drove down Komeito vote counts. The party has dropped from a peak of about nine million votes to under six million votes in general elections over the past two decades.
The alliance between Komeito and the LDP has never been an easy one, and over the past decade a constituency of Soka Gakkai devotees (I call them the “loyal opposition”) have called for major party reforms—in particular, having Komeito cut ties with the LDP. With Takaichi’s rise to prime minister, the Gakkai’s loyal opposition received their wish.
The main reason Komeito split with the LDP was unwillingness on the part of local-level Soka Gakkai members to campaign on behalf of corrupt LDP politicians; Takaichi appointed some of the worst offenders in the slush fund fracas to top posts in her party. In October, when Komeito’s leader Tetsuo Saitō met with local-level party leaders to ask them about supporting Takaichi as PM, he was told that party supporters in local districts would not back her.
Put simply, it was non-elite lay Buddhist activists in Japanese neighborhoods who called an end to the generation-old LDP-Komeito coalition. The prospect of continuing to make excuses for LDP candidates soiled by their party’s dirty money embarrassments was too much for these vote-gathering devotees. They finally sent Komeito into the opposition and transformed Japan’s political make-up.
Shinto-Centric Nationalism Influences Japanese Politics Today
Komeito’s additional stated reasons for splitting with the LDP were 1) the fact that Sanae Takaichi has consistently promoted Japanese nationalist goals that are strongly coded by controversial Shinto-informed religio-political commitments and 2) concerns about her anti-foreigner sentiments. Takaichi’s platform emphasizes opposing immigration and echoing fears about foreigners’ rising presence in Japan. She favors laws to ensure that Japan’s emperor must be of patrilineal descent, in keeping with Shinto teachings about Japan’s imperial sovereign descended in an unbroken line from the sun goddess.
And since the beginning of her political career in the 1990s, Takaichi has joined historical revisionist initiatives aimed at erasing or rewriting accounts of Japanese atrocities perpetrated during the Pacific War. She has made regular visits to the controversial Shinto shrine Yasukuni, which commemorates Japan’s war dead and outrages China and other neighbors afflicted by wartime Japanese barbarities. Her dedication to Yasukuni is notable even by LDP standards: for example, she was the only cabinet minister to join Abe and then PM Koizumi Jun’ichirō on a 2007 Yasukuni visit on the anniversary of the end of World War II.
Takaichi received praise for her successful meeting in October with US President Donald Trump, whom Abe famously charmed. In recent weeks, she has raised alarm bells by boldly announcing Japanese defense of Taiwan, sparking the ire of the People’s Republic and complicating Japan-China relations. The Chinese government has responded with sharp diplomatic retorts and large-scale economic retaliation against Japan. This has affected global trade and reignited regional tensions.
Meanwhile, Takaichi is holding firm. Her rhetoric has been in keeping with nationalist ideologies promoted by Nippon Kaigi (to which she is a signatory), the Matsushita Institute of Government and Management (where she trained in the 1980s after her undergraduate education), and other organizations that push for Japan to defend its territory and allies by reasserting itself as a regional power, hearkening back to Japan’s Imperial past.
Where once Komeito—which, alongside Soka Gakkai, maintained links to the Chinese government for decades—may have smoothed things over on behalf of the LDP, the Japanese government now faces diplomatic challenges without longstanding backchannel options.
Just weeks ago, Takaichi’s support in Japan’s National Diet was uncertain and her future as prime minister far from guaranteed. But since she took the office of PM, Takaichi and her government have enjoyed popularity levels her embattled Liberal Democratic Party has not seen since before Abe’s assassination. So far, her bold leadership style is making a strong impact.
A “Fight Worth Losing”: Japan’s Uncertain Politics/Religion Future
Working with Shinto-linked nationalists was nothing new for Komeito. But supporting Takaichi and the LDP politicians chosen as her closest advisors was a bridge too far for Komeito’s Gakkai supporters.
While Sanae Takaichi’s rise to Japanese Prime Minister is noteworthy for many reasons, media coverage has largely overlooked religious elements of her rise to power and the nature of her new governing coalition. This is a historic moment: Japan’s recent party realignments are already affecting domestic policies, election prospects, security postures, U.S.-Japan relations, approaches to constitutional issues, strategically significant connections between Japan and its Asian neighbors, and especially tensions between Japan and China.
Looking ahead, the split between the LDP and Komeito is likely to cost the LDP at the polls. Losing Gakkai-driven votes means that Takaichi’s party may drop as many as 20% of their seats in the Diet’s Lower House in the next general election, potentially moving the LDP into second place behind the opposition Constitutional Democratic Party. Takaichi has struck up an arrangement with another conservative nationalist party, Ishin no Kai (Japan Innovation Party). But whether Ishin can generate electoral support to compare with Soka Gakkai’s historical strength, or if its politicians are willing to spend years fostering a lasting coalition, remains to be seen.
Ironically, their demand that Komeito abandon the governing coalition means that Soka Gakkai members have enabled the LDP to pursue aims their religion and party have combatted for decades. And they may have spelled the end of Komeito as a presence in the National Diet. But as one Gakkai member friend in Japan put it to me shortly after the coalition dissolved, at least campaigns for Komeito candidates going forward will be “fights worth losing.” No longer required to make excuses for a corrupt partner, Gakkai adherents will be able to argue in good conscience for their religion’s affiliated party.
Buddhist practitioners in local communities have upended the government of a G7 nation—demonstrating the necessity of thinking critically about religion to understand politics. Even in a seemingly “nonreligious” country like Japan.
Levi McLaughlin is Professor at the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies, North Carolina State University. He is co-author of Kōmeitō: Politics and Religion in Japan (IEAS Berkeley, 2014) and author of Soka Gakkai’s Human Revolution: The Rise of a Mimetic Nation in Modern Japan (University of Hawai`i Press, 2019; in Japanese from Kodansha, 2024), as well as numerous book chapters and articles on disaster, religion, politics, and other topics.
To cite this essay, please use the entry suggested below:
Levi McLaughlin, “Sanae Takaiichi and Japan’s Uncertain Politics/Religion Future,” criticalasianstudies.org Commentary Board, December 8, 2025. https://doi.org/10.52698/TVIE8862.