ABSTRACT
As has been seen in Chapter 1, the Japan Socialist Party (JSP) lost much of its support during the 1990s. Support began to drop in the early 1990s after the First Gulf War and the hopes of the 1989 victories of the party began to subside. Support then dropped incrementally before ‘bottoming out’ in early 1996 before the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) was formed. This drop in support was not confined to the JSP, as there was a general decline in support across the whole political spectrum, but, proportionately, the drop in support for the JSP was particularly large. In this chapter, we shall consider why the JSP lost support, by concentrating on the ideological basis of the party. We shall then assess how the DPJ has taken on this mantle of ideology and examine how it is coping with these issues as a party of disparate groups and differing views. But first, we must quickly establish what the problem is, which can be broadly defined as being based on the Constitution that divides parties so much in Japan.
