Japan Democratic Party
일본민주당
A Japanese conservative party formed in November 1954 by the anti-Yoshida conservatives, chiefly the Hatoyama Ichirō group of the Liberal Party and the Kaishintō. It formed the first Hatoyama cabinet soon after its founding and became the largest party in the 1955 general election. It disappeared in November 1955 when it merged with the Liberal Party (the “conservative merger”) to form the Liberal Democratic Party.
In depth
According to the Japanese source, Japanese politics in 1954 was a three-way contest between the Liberal Party and the Kaishintō, heirs of the two prewar conservative parties, and the Japan Socialist Party, split into left and right wings. The fifth Yoshida cabinet rested on the Liberal Party alone with outside cooperation from the Kaishintō, but the prolonged “one-man” rule of Yoshida Shigeru fed a long intra-party struggle with the anti-mainstream Hatoyama Ichirō faction. In March 1954, amid the shipbuilding scandal, a new conservative party merging the Liberals and the Kaishintō was proposed; when this collapsed in June, its joint council was used to plan an anti-Yoshida party of the Liberal Hatoyama faction, the Kaishintō and the Japan Liberal Party, and the Japan Democratic Party was founded on 24 November. Yoshida tried and failed to dissolve the House of Representatives, and the first Hatoyama Ichirō cabinet took office on 10 December.
The English source names Ichirō Hatoyama, former foreign minister Mamoru Shigemitsu and future Prime Minister Nobusuke Kishi as founders, and says the party arose from the merger of the group Hatoyama had led out of the Liberal Party in 1953 with the Shigemitsu-led Kaishintō. Shigemitsu served as the party’s vice-president. As a minority ruling party, the Democrats dissolved the House of Representatives on 24 January 1955; in the 27th general election of 27 February they became the largest party but fell short of a majority, while the Socialists, left and right combined, won almost as many seats.
With the Socialists rising, a merger of the Democrats and the Liberals, the so-called conservative merger, came onto the agenda. In the Democratic Party it was driven by General Council chairman Miki Bukichi and secretary-general Nobusuke Kishi, while former left-leaning Kaishintō members such as Miki Takeo and Matsumura Kenzō opposed it, arguing that a two-party system of conservatives and progressives would hinder healthy parliamentary politics. Spurred by the reunification of the Socialists on 13 October 1955 and by demands from business, the merger was realised on 15 November 1955 and the Liberal Democratic Party was formed. In August that year the party had published a pamphlet on “deplorable” bias in school textbooks, which provoked controversy. The Japanese source says LDP factions such as the Seiwakai carried on its lineage and were called the “conservative side-stream”, as opposed to the Liberal “mainstream”.