The was a Japanese political party that existed in the early 1990s. It was founded in 1993 by 44 members of the Liberal Democratic Party led by

Tsutomu Hata was a Japanese politician who served as Prime Minister of Japan for nine weeks in 1994. He took over from Morihiro Hosokawa at the head of a coalition government. Shortly after he had been appointed Prime Minister, the Japanese Socialist Party l ...

and

Ichirō Ozawa is a Japanese politician and has been a member of the House of Representatives since 1969, representing the Iwate 3rd district (Iwate 2nd district prior to the 1996 general election and Iwate 4th district prior to the 2017 general election). H ...

. It was instrumental in ending the LDP's 38-year dominance of Japanese politics. Both reformers, Hata and Ozawa had been involved in a difficult leadership struggle within the former Takeshita faction of the LDP. Their opponents, led by Keizo Obuchi and

Ryutaro Hashimoto was a Japanese politician who served as the Prime Minister of Japan from 1996 to 1998. He was the leader of one of the largest factions within the ruling LDP through most of the 1990s and remained a powerful back-room player in Japanese politi ...

, were using the fallout of the

Sagawa Kyubin is a major transportation company in Japan. Its headquarters are in Minami-ku, Kyoto. It competes with Yamato Transport, Nippon Express, and other major logistics companies. Its total sales for the year ending March 2005 were ¥728,000,000,000 ...

scandal as a tool to undermine the reformist position. Hata and Ozawa split from the party partly to shift media attention away from the scandal. In doing so, they transformed an internal party dispute to a wide-ranging conflict that led to a decade of shifting allegiances and short-lived parties. In the

elections An election is a formal group decision-making process by which a population chooses an individual or multiple individuals to hold public office. Elections have been the usual mechanism by which modern representative democracy has operate ...

immediately following the split, the JRP won 55 seats, making it one of the most powerful opposition parties. Most importantly, the party drew off support crucial to the LDP. While several other small parties had split from the LDP, Hata and Ozawa's group was the largest, and was widely considered to have finally broken the back of LDP dominance. Known for his political organisational skills, Ozawa organised a five-party coalition of the JRP, the

Japan Socialist Party The was a socialist and progressive political party in Japan that existed from 1945 to 1996. The party was founded as the Social Democratic Party of Japan by members of several proletarian parties that existed before World War II, including ...

, the Democratic Socialist Party,

Komeito , formerly New Komeito and abbreviated NKP, is a conservative political party in Japan founded by lay members of the Buddhist Japanese new religious movement Soka Gakkai in 1964. Since 2012, it has served in government as the junior coalitio ...

and the

United Social Democratic Party The United Social Democratic Party ( pt, Partido Unido Social Democrático, PUSD) is a centre-left social democratic political party in Guinea-Bissau. History The party was established on 30 May 1991 and legalised on 6 June 1992.Peter Karibe Men ...

. This coalition held 237 seats in the

Diet Diet may refer to: Food * Diet (nutrition), the sum of the food consumed by an organism or group * Dieting, the deliberate selection of food to control body weight or nutrient intake ** Diet food, foods that aid in creating a diet for weight loss ...

, and after convincing the

Japan New Party The was a Japanese political party that existed briefly from 1992 to 1994. The party, considered liberal, was founded by Morihiro Hosokawa, a former Diet member and Kumamoto Prefecture governor, who left the Liberal Democratic Party to protest ...

and the

New Party Sakigake The , also known as the New Harbinger Party, was a political party in Japan that broke away from the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) on 22 June 1993. The party was created by Masayoshi Takemura. The party was centrist, and had many reformist an ...

to join, was able to form a government under

Morihiro Hosokawa is a Japanese politician and noble who was Prime Minister of Japan from 1993 to 1994, leading a coalition government which was the first non- Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) government of Japan since 1955. After a funding scandal in early 1994, h ...

. As the impetus for the collapse of LDP power, the JRP was able to exert great power in the coalition. While some concessions to other parties were made, the JRP was perhaps overly dominant, eventually forcing some other members out of the coalition through its heavy-handed style. In 1994, the JRP merged into the New Frontier Party.

Presidents of JRP

Election results

House of Representatives

References

{{Authority control Conservative parties in Japan Defunct conservative parties Defunct political parties in Japan Neoconservative parties Political parties established in 1993 Political parties disestablished in 1994 1993 establishments in Japan 1994 disestablishments in Japan