Elections in Japan

Since I've been here there have been a couple elections, but up until now they've only been to elect a couple of people, like the mayor or a Diet representative. This spring though was the election for the city council, so while I've seen some of the workings of elections on a smaller scale before now, it was extreme enough this time that I thought to write about it.

The first thing you notice that let's you know that there's going to be an election soon is the billboards. The city puts up plywood billboards at locations all over the city, divided into numbered sections. When the campaign period officially begins (just a couple weeks before the election), each candidate can put a poster in their numbered spot. Invariably the poster is a big headshot of the candidate smiling and their name in large letters, and maybe there's a tiny amount of writing somewhere with generic platitudes like "Let's make the city great!" or "I'll improve people's livelihoods!" or other low-substance phrases short on actual policies.

One interesting thing to notice is that while almost all Japanese names are written with Chinese characters, on these posters it's not uncommon for them to have pronunciation guides, or for part of the name (first or last) to be written out phonetically with no Chinese characters at all. The reason for this is that Japanese ballots don't have names listed out where you just mark who you're voting for, they're just a blank box where you have to write the name of your candidate. If you miswrite the name, it's not valid, and since many names with the same pronunciation can be written with different characters, having the voters write just the pronunciation is a way to prevent those mistakes.

Another problem of that system is that someone might write just the first or last name of a candidate. This is valid, but if there are multiple candidates with the same name, there's no way to tell who they intended to vote for. So what happens is that it gets divided according to the number of unambiguous votes the candidates got. If Sasaki A got 1648 votes and Sasaki B got 352 votes, then a vote for just Sasaki counts as 0.824 votes for A and 0.176 votes for B (since A got 82.4% of the combined Sasakis votes and B got 17.6%). So then when the results are announced you'll see candidates winning fractions of votes like 1648.824 votes.

If you miss the billboards, the way that you'll know for sure that an election has begun is the sound trucks. They start at exactly 8am and although they're apparently allowed to run until 8pm they mostly died down by about 6. As with the posters, nothing of substance is said. It's just, "Sasaki A, this is Sasaki A! Please vote for Sasaki A! Sasaki A!"

I did get one or two flyers in my mailbox throughout the campaign, but even then they were hand delivered by volunteers, not mailed through the post office. What I did get in the mail though was a big envelope from the city with a big folded-up poster sized sheet in it divided into sections like the billboards with each candidate having a section that they could put their own advertisement in. They were similar to the posters with the same headshots, but then actually had more substantial information on them. Maybe the idea is that the billboard posters are mostly seen from cars, so they just have an easy to see photo and name, but these had more info because they're sat down and read. I don't watch much TV here, but I get the feeling that like with all other forms of political advertising, campaign commercials are probably banned. I do know that although TV stations can choose to give candidates airtime, they have to offer equal airtime to all opposing candidates too.

One of the flyers I got had an invitation to a speaking event at the candidate's campaign headquarters, which I feel is one of the only ways to really get to know a candidate and their policies with all the restrictions on advertising. But one of the other methods I saw was a stump speech. Coming home from work one day as I was passing the supermarket one of the candidates was standing across the street shouting in the direction of the supermarket and a few people were stopped nearby listening to him.

A final thing worth mentioning is political parties. Although the vast majority of candidates ran as independents, there were a couple that displayed a party affiliation. At the local level it seems like things are mostly non-partisan, at least with relation to the national parties, but there do seem to be blocs formed based on local issues. The elections for governors too are usually between independents, although the candidates are usually backed by the national parties, and I hear that in return for this backing the governors choose cabinet appointees from the supportive parties.

So based on what I've seen, the upsides of this system are that candidates get very equal exposure, instead of those with the money being able to saturate the campaign, but is seems to be at the expense of being able to get much information about the candidates at all. There's no inundation of annoying mailings and TV ads, but that's replaced with an inundation of annoying sound trucks. I feel like it's probably possible to strike a good balance between the months-long, completely unregulated, bought-and-paid-for US campaigns, and the over-regulated to the extent of containing no useful information Japanese campaigns. Maybe other countries have been able to find that happy balance.