The factions of Japan’s Liberal Democratic Party (LDP or Jimintō) have received ample attention from academics, given their position as the power holders and brokers of Japan, which has allowed them to shape and direct the political scene of post-war modern Japan. Factions have been described as tools of electoral success and career advancement, collecting and dispersing funds and votes within the Jimintō both for the sake of faction members and leaders. The dominant ways of looking at the state of factionalism within the Jimintō – and in Japanese politics in general – have tended to characterize and explain their existence as a manifestation of Japanese culture, a force of electoral necessity, or as a result of the political development of Japan. However, given the one-party dominance of the Jimintō in Japan, another point of view regarding factional politics should be entertained: intraparty democracy. This study aims to understand the factions of the Jimintō as forces of intraparty democratization, given their intraparty competition for power and position as connections between grassroots and party level institutions. Constructing a framework for intraparty democracy and comparing it to the practices of factionalism in Japan, this paper seeks to increase our understanding of whether, and if so how, can the factions of the Jimintō be characterized as forces of intraparty democracy.