In Reward Of Japan’s Election Campaigns — Tokyo Evaluation

With the marketing campaign for the 2017 Home of Representatives election now firmly behind us — it ended sharply at midnight on Saturday, with strictly enforced rules preventing anything that is likely to be construed as campaigning on polling day, Sunday — it’s price taking a moment to consider a few of the positives about how Japan runs its elections.

Actually, tons of individuals can be blissful to see the sound-trucks gone from their streets; one Tokyo Overview writer spent the previous fortnight changing into increasingly satisfied that the complete marketing campaign of Tokyo District 1 oddball candidate Matayoshi Sure was being carried out by circling his apartment building with a sound-truck from morning till night. Once we described the Japanese campaigning fashion as bordering on «twee» in a earlier editorial, it wasn’t an unfair assessment. Compared to the massively costly, multi-channel extravaganza that voters are subjected to in other advanced democracies, Japan’s carefully regulated and really conventional campaigns really feel like they come from another period completely.

That’s not necessarily a bad thing. There is something laudably all the way down to earth concerning the sight of a cabinet minister braving the autumn rain to offer a speech to a handful of supporters on a chilly weekday night, or ふじみ野市議会議員選挙 a veteran lawmaker dutifully doing the rounds of his local commerce organisations, skilled associations and unions to listen to their considerations and make his pitch. In a rustic the place — like many others — politics is usually criticised for being a playground of the elite, election campaigns power the political courses out of Nagatacho and into the streets and assembly halls of peculiar Japanese residents. This kind of «putting in the hours» campaigning really does have an effect; former Prime Minister Naoto Kan’s victory in Tokyo 18 and the re-election of the scandal-hit Shiori Yamao in Aichi 7 both owe an amazing deal to the respective candidates’ willingness to speak on every avenue nook, shake palms outside every prepare station and attend every meeting.

Powerful campaigning rules mean politicians don’t have any choice however to go out and meet the individuals they’re alleged to characterize

That kind of direct reference to voters, nevertheless superficial and non permanent, is one thing that election campaigns in lots of nations have misplaced (and at the moment are making an attempt to recapture, with restricted success, through Huge Data operations and social media monitoring). The numerous tens of millions injected into campaigns in countries just like the USA and the UK have largely made politics even more remote from voters, confining it to glitzy Tv studios and carefully stage-managed public occasions with hand-picked audiences. Japan’s tight regulation on campaign finance and media utilization may have meant that political advertising is stuck in the 1970s (both in terms of production values and when it comes to media saturation), however it’s additionally meant that politicians haven’t any selection but to go out and meet the folks they’re presupposed to characterize — up shut and in individual.

Japan’s campaigning type is far from good, and it does must evolve in sure methods — particularly in order to meet the challenges of campaigning in urban areas, the place the standard type of marketing campaign (focused heavily on partaking political networks that were widespread in rural constituencies, however usually don’t exist in urban districts) is more and more ineffective. The stubborn insistence on lowering the number of Diet seats despite Japan already having an incredibly excessive variety of voters per representative in its urban regions is one other impediment to this campaigning model. Private connections can’t be successfully built if there are simply too many people to engage, and the over-sized urban districts make a mockery of the notion of «local» representatives and contribute to the sense of disconnection from politics felt by many Japanese voters.

Overall, although, it’s onerous to escape the concept for all its many failings, a campaigning model that makes politicians come to their voters to plead their case in particular person — in small city corridor conferences, in windswept speeches exterior supermarkets, or on rainy evenings outdoors busy prepare stations — is somewhat nearer to the ideal of representative democracy than the months-lengthy media assault election campaigning has turn out to be elsewhere.

An earlier model of this article originally appeared in Tokyo Review’s weekly newsletter, which is sent to subscribers every Friday afternoon and includes a round-up of the week’s best writing on Japan from our site and across the net, together with early access to this op-ed column. It’s free to subscribe, so sign up below!