The Centrist Reform Alliance (CRA)–a merger of the main opposition Constitutional Democratic Party (CDP) and former ruling coalition partner Komeito–marks less an innovation than the endpoint of a journey that began over 30 years ago. It also invites reflection on a core question since the dawn of the Heisei era in 1989: reformism as a central paradigm of Japanese political discourse and a major analytical lens of power dynamics in the country.
Reformism, a term as vague as its dictionary definition, lends itself to multiple interpretations, according to context and epoch. In my writing, I adopt Moez Hayat’s perspective from his 2021 piece, defining reformism as the drive to substantially, and even constitutionally, alter Japan’s post-1947 regime. Hayat argued that this urgency transcends party lines, eclipsing the classical left-right axis in Japanese politics.
And, most noticeably, he observed that similar pushes for social and institutional rejuvenation are no longer dominant within the center-left opposition, which has grown risk-averse and preservational. Just like Hayat, I define “conservative” functionally, not ideologically. Instead, those reformist tendencies have found a home in some branches of the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) and the political right.
In Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville observed that some ideas recur relentlessly, “as do hunger and thirst.” Reform projects are no exception, resurfacing throughout history—including in Japan. Yet the notion truly crystallised as a core issue in Japanese politics during the early 1990s, when much of the then-Takeshita faction split from the LDP. This event shattered the myth of one-party rule and gave substance to long-promised political reform, as Aurelia George Mulgan notes in her incisive 2014 biography of opposition leader Ichirō Ozawa.
The veteran politician transformed that abstraction into a precise strategy: bipolarism, power alternation, and a first-past-the-post system to “drain the swamp” of corruption and bring about regime change. Much of Japan’s opposition politics since has been a halting, incoherent quest to revive Ozawa’s Kaizō Keikaku (Blueprint for a New Japan), the title of his famous best-selling book.
Ozawa’s envisioned bipolarism never materialised—not even during the Democratic Party of Japan’s (DPJ) three-year rule starting in 2009. The fractious coalition Ozawa engineered proved incapable of governing effectively, let alone reshaping the balance of power or Japan’s institutional framework, producing “political change without policy change.”
After the DPJ debacle, its successors—chiefly today’s CDP—have campaigned even less credibly on nominal change, while their main point has become a preservation of the current political order from the risks of right-wing involutions. The CDP thus acts less as a reformist alternative than as a conservative guardian of the status quo, hoping it remains as favorable to social liberalism as possible.
Another theoretically progressive force that has long abandoned pretenses of regime change is Komeito. The party, shaped by the Sōka Gakkai sect of Nichiren Buddhism, forgot about its reform ambitions as early as 1999, opting instead to join forces with the LDP. There, Komeito served as a moderate brake on the LDP’s right-wing policies, essentially becoming an agent of anti-reformism, especially on constitutional matters, while pushes for reform came precisely from the most reactionary fringes of the ruling party most interested in breaking the dominance of moderates and imposing change.
The CDP and Komeito have long existed to preserve the current political order–just from opposed trenches. While it makes sense that the representatives of labour union Rengō and the spokespeople of the Sōka Gakkai may be keen on defending the present Constitution, the first under which they were allowed to prosper, their attachment to the status quo is what has turned their discourses into microwaved slogans and diluted their credentials of reformism.
Their electoral decline has been a constant feature of the Heisei and Reiwa eras, leading to today’s hastily arranged marriage for electoral purposes. In this sense, the CRA is not an alliance of reformers, but a coalition of actors for whom reform has become an object of anxiety. It is simply the political vehicle of two conservative forces.
The CDP’s decision to run on a joint ticket with its former rival makes perfect tactical sense. Facing stiff competition from the Democratic Party for the People (DPP)–the other major DPJ heir–any boost to its voter base maintains its status as the LDP’s main opposition. The ambition here is clearly not victory, but short-sighted survival.
The Komeito’s strategic relocation, from the LDP’s junior partner to the opposition ranks, is much more interesting. By relinquishing its long-standing role as the internal brake on the LDP, Komeito has returned to the pole where its identity fits most naturally: progressive on welfare, pacifist on security, and constitutionally conservative. It has chosen, in classical terms, to be first in Gaul rather than second in Rome. That is, instead of feeling out of place in a LDP-led government and under the threat of electoral retribution by its disaffected voters, it has chosen to sit comfortably outside of the equation.
The cost of that choice, however, could be severe, even if Komeito ends up dominating the CRA. Indeed, with the current polling being so disheartening for the Centrists, loyal and reliable Buddhist voters will likely prove to be the backbone of the party, granting further leverage to Komeito and its backers. Yet, moral centrality without access to government is a precarious form of power, and politics can be unkind to those who confuse the two.
From its proponents’ standpoint, the marriage between the two parties does not appear that improbable. After all, it relaunches Ozawa’s vision of two-party competition: a heterogeneous center-left pitted against an LDP anchored in bureaucracy, rural pork barrel, and financial capital.
Yet that bipolarism never truly materialised in the 1990s, when a similar alliance was first created (the New Frontier Party between 1994 and 1997), nor did it consolidate in the following years, when Komeito opposed rather than backed the DPJ’s ascension to power. Expecting different results now is unrealistic–and the CRA’s poor polling confirms most voters share this skepticism.
Confucius was convinced, writing in Analects that good governance is lost when the expressions used in the public arena no longer correspond to their meaning.
Because of that, he prescribed, as the prime mandate of rulers, the rectification of words. The CRA, grandchild of the then-New Frontier Party, has chosen to entrench its tired discourse in a rhetoric that is both implausible and prematurely aged.
The election results on Sunday may deliver a fatal judgement on that principle. The wind of reformism blows somewhere else. It will behove the transformational right to bear its standard, to develop its praxis, to deliver on its promise.
It is instead urgent for the new party to undergo its own rectification of words—to find new purpose, new strategies, new slogans, new faces. The question is now whether those two honorable yet exhausted actors possess the resolve and imagination to do it.
Giacomo Comincini is an Italian scholar researching Japanese history and politics. He is President of the Interlinguistical Centre of Switzerland and co-director of the Kinsetsu Institute. He is currently a PhD candidate in History at the University of Pavia, Italy.
