Political parties of the Empire of Japan public assembly, the press and on political discussion. The Meiji government had come to power by an elite of "samurai" from certain clans ("hanbatsu") and the "genrō" felt threatened by anything looking ever remotely like republicanism or democracy. During this period, Itagaki Taisuke and Ōkuma Shigenobu were leading figures in the legitimization of political parties. Itagaki created Japan's first political party, the Aikoku Kōtō, in 1873 in Tokyo to petition for an elected assembly, and a similar regional party based in Osaka, the Aikokusha. These groups were the basis of the Jiyutō (Liberal Party), founded in 1881 as Japan’s first
Democratic Party of Japan the bureaucracy would help deprive the DPJ of the power to implement their other reforms. Other factors that affected the dissolution of the party were the internal conflicts that paralyzed the DPJ and the fact that the DPJ aligned itself with the foreign policy of the LDP. The Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) called their philosophy , which was determined in the first party convention on 27 April 1998. The DPJ aimed to create a platform broad enough to encompass the views of politicians who had roots in either the Liberal Democratic Party or Japan Socialist Party. Party leader Naoto