The Diet is the Japanese parliament; the word comes from Germany which provided the early models for Japanese constitutional development in the 1880s when the Meiji constitution was researched. It has always been composed of two houses. Before 1946, there was the elected House of Representatives and the House of Peers which was based on a nobility. Since the new constitution was implemented in 1947, the House of Representatives has considerably more power than the House of Councilors which is now also elected.
