Japan Lower House election – Meet the candidates Part 0 – What voting means and how it works

On Tuesday, parts of Japan’s political net-osphere will go dark as the official campaigning period begins for the August 30 general election to select members of the nation’s lower house of parliament. Considering that this election has the potential to take government control away from the ruling Liberal Democratic Party for the first time in 13 years, national and international attention on this race is high.

So what can I add to the conversation? My interest in Japanese politics and other current events is fairly intense, so I plan to follow this story with the same rigor I apply to my other favorite topics.

Mainly,  I plan to profile the candidates up for election in my district (Tokyo’s 13th) to give a worm’s-eye-view of the election from my perch in Adachi-ku, Tokyo. Some readers will recall my series of candidate profiles leading up to last month’s Tokyo prefectural assembly elections.

But first, some opening remarks:

What will this election decide?

On Sunday, August 30, Japanese voters will go to the polls to elect all 480 members of the House of Representatives, the more powerful house of the country’s bicameral legislative branch of government. After the election, the Diet (Japan’s word for its parliament) will be convened to choose a prime minister, who will then form a cabinet. The upper and lower house will each conduct a vote, but if the upper house vote differs from the lower house’s, the lower house’s choice will prevail. If one party has won an outright majority of seats in the lower house, it can elect a prime minister without the aid of any other party, but if not various parties will have to negotiate and form a coalition government.

The lower house is where most substantive legislative business is done. It controls the passage of the national budget, can override an upper house veto with a two-thirds vote, and most importantly decides the appointment of the prime minister. The DPJ currently controls the upper house, which is a less powerful but still significant part of the legislative process.

The party (or coalition of parties) that wins this election will ostensibly gain control over essentially the entire country — if the DPJ gains control it will preside over the executive branch, dominate both houses of the legislature, and possess the power to appoint Supreme Court and lower court justices.

In practice, however, the prime minister and cabinet’s power has been limited – to give a very broad outline, powerful ministries set the agenda on most important national issues, the legislature exists mainly to ratify that agenda and distract the public with loud but ineffectual drama and scandal (in exchange for funneling money back to their districts), and the judicial nominees are almost never decided by the elected officials themselves.

The opposition Democratic Party of Japan are on track to make significant gains in this election, though it will be a tall order to increase their current standings (110) to exceed the LDP’s total of 303. The DPJ are campaigning on many issues, but perhaps first and foremost on a revolutionary vision of administrative reform. They believe that the bureaucrats in the country maintain power based on, in Secretary General Acting President Naoto Kan’s words, a “mistaken interpretation of the Constitution” that bureaucracy has the inherent right to control government administration, while it’s the job of the cabinet and legislature concentrate on passing laws. The DPJ would like to wrest control away from the “iron triangle” of unelected bureaucrats, powerful business interests, and their cronies in the Diet and place power squarely in the politicians’ hands. But more on that later.

How are members selected?

Since the law was changed in 1993 following a major LDP electoral defeat, members of Japan’s lower house have been chosen using two parallel systems – 300 are selected through single-member districts nationwide similar to the US House of Representatives, while the remaining 180 seats are allotted through a proportional representation system (or PR for short).

Under Japan’s PR system, the parties running in the election field candidates in each of 11 regions. On election day, voters write down two votes for the lower house – one for their preferred individual in their district, and the other to choose a party they’d like to receive the PR seats in their region. In the interest of counting as many votes as possible, votes will still count if a voter writes in the name of an individual running in the region or the party leader’s name instead of the party name.

For example of how this works, in 2005 the Tokyo PR district had 17 available seats. To win a seat, a party would have had to earn at least 5.88% of the vote, or 389,682 votes. Only one party that ran (Shinto Nippon with 290,027 votes) failed to gain a seat in this district.

The fact that relatively fewer votes are needed to win a PR seat has convinced smaller parties to try their luck. Most recently, the Happiness Realization Party, a newly formed political wing of new religion Happy Science, has decided to field more than 300 candidates in all single-member and PR districts (though as of this writing it is unclear whether they will actually go through with it). The religion’s leader Ryuho Okawa has announced his intention to run in the Kinki PR district with the top position. To do so he will need 3.45% of the vote, which would have been around 375,000 votes in 2005. His party would have to seriously improve its performance after winning a dismal 0.682% (13,401 votes in 10 districts) of votes in the Tokyo prefectural elections. Okawa had originally planned to run in Tokyo, but Tokyo has a higher 5.88% hurdle to overcome.

How does voting work in practice?

After entering the polling station, voters will be handed a paper ballot and a pencil (yes, a pencil, not a pen). They will be directed to a table with a list of candidates and instructions on how to vote. There they will write in the name of their preferred candidate along with their PR vote. To make it easier for voters to remember, many candidates spell their names using phonetic hiragana instead of kanji, which can be harder to write and have many different readings.

Since this election will also include a people’s review of nine of Japan’s 15 Supreme Court justices, voters will be required to mark an X next to the names of justices they would like to see dismissed. Blank votes will be counted as in favor of keeping them on.

In my next post, I’ll talk about the issues and outlook for this specific election before getting into the more provincial task of profiling my local candidates.

9 thoughts on “Japan Lower House election – Meet the candidates Part 0 – What voting means and how it works”

  1. Kozo:

    Good question, and the short answer is “yes.” I will get back to you with more detail in a bit, but for now you can search for 期日前投票 in your home district. If you are abroad, you need to have registered ahead of time with your local embassy/consulate. If not you are out of luck (Utada Hikaru got burned by that last time around).

  2. Not sure if we’re talking about the same thing…

    I’m wondering what would happen if I wrote the name of someone who isn’t running on a ballot. If I got a bunch of my friends to write-in “Adam Richards” on their ballots, will election officials actually tally up the Adamu votes, or would they just get treated as spoiled ballots. What would happen if my grassroots movement was so successful that “Adam Richards” garnered the most votes?

    So I guess my question is whether Japanese election law has provisions for electing write-in candidates.

  3. oh for some reason I interpreted “write-in” as “absentee” – also a good question and I am not sure…

  4. I don’t have the time to dig through the relevant law to make sure, but I’d be surprised if there weren’t a requirement that the winning candidate have gone through the whole 公示 process properly to be eligible for the seat.

  5. Durf is right:

    (無効投票)
    第68条 衆議院(比例代表選出)議員又は参議院(比例代表選出)議員の選挙以外の選挙の投票については、次の各号のいずれかに該当するものは、無効とする。
    2.公職の候補者でない者又は第86条の8第1項、第87条第1項若しくは第2項、第87条の2、第88条、第251条の2若しくは第251条の3の規定により公職の候補者となることができない者の氏名を記載したもの

  6. Thanks for doing that digging. The billboard outside Kasumigaseki station I saw this morning had signs up for Kaieda Banri (DPJ), Yosano Kaoru (LDP), and a woman whose name I can’t remember (Happiness). Hoping to see Matayoshi Jesus make his appearance there as well.

  7. Speaking of Yosano Kaoru, he is off to a shaky start, as he was too lightheaded to stand by himself at the campaign kickoff, then his hand was shaking when he tried to paint the eye on the daruma, according to news reports.
    (I’m looking forward to writing 管 直人 on the ballot for the first time.)

  8. I figured it was probably that way. I just never knew that voters had to write out the name of the candidate on the ballot. I guess it saves election officials from printing out district specific ballots.

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