ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the nature of political money in Japan within the context of the law that purports to regulate a crucial activity-namely, the Political Funds Control Law (PFCL). It focuses on various fund-raising techniques in some detail and focuses on the last major overhaul of the PFCL in an effort to understand the problems of political financing facing the party system. The law that requires the reporting of various political funding activities is the PFCL. The annual report on the nature of political fund-raising is released to the nation’s media. Elections are most expensive when the Liberal Democratic party or conservative independent candidates are in conflict within the same constituency. In such cases, which occur in all 130 constituencies, the real battle is among the conservatives and not between the conservatives and opposition parties. In the most extreme cases, these conflicts may result in an ever-escalating pattern of money politics and even vote-buying.
