Wow. Can't add much to Aurelia's and Jun's good postings, especially since especially Aurelia's was no comprehensive. But just want to pick up on something both of them touched on: factions and groups becoming more like the earlier factions of both the prior Liberals and Democrats, early LDP, meaning pre-1957 or so, and even pre-late 1970s LDP to some extent. After such excellent books like Sato and Matsuzaki's and Inoguchi and Iwai's came out in the mid-1980s and extensively described LDP factions, everyone began assuming that the form they were in at that time and afterwards was the form they had always taken from the beginning. That's not what they said but that's the stereotype that arose and upon which many future assumptions about LDP party organization were based.

In fact, as Kawato Sadafumi has shown statistically, many of these characteristics of the LDP's organization concerning promotion to positions based on seniority etc. did not even get completely institutionalized until the late 1970s. And it took almost thirty years for this to occur as factions in the predecessor Liberals and Democrats and in the newly formed LDP did not look like the factions prior to electoral reform in
1994: they were looser groups, less loyalty, no consistent funding, based on being for- or against- a particular leader (like Hatoyama Ichirou or Yoshida), and sometimes included policy differences, etc. [Hulda Thóra Sveinsdóttir has an excellent dissertation from University of Newcastle on Tyne about this]. Sound familiar? Should because I think that's what BOTH DPJ and LDP groups are like today. After electoral reform, as we all know, factions were greatly weakened in the LDP. All faction members in many of the factions the Aso-Fukuda leader selection race for example did not
even vote for the same person. The DPJ groups have
always been similar to this. So ironically, I think the answer is yes--DPJ groups and LDP factions resemble each other much more today. But NOT because the DPJ groups are becoming more like the old LDP factions, but rather because the LDP factions have become more like the DPJ groups which in turn resemble the early factions in the LDP. Robert Pekkanen and I deal with these issues on the LDP in chs. 4 and 5 of our book, as Aurelia noted.

As for Ozawa's money, Ethan Scheiner has an excellent paper in which he has an analysis of the Ozawa vs. Kan selection in which his data indicates that Ozawa's contributing campaign money to a DPJ representative that was closely correlated with supporting him against Kan (the other relevant variable was whether DPJ members in their their local district had voted for Kan or Ozawa).

Best regards,
Ellis