Japanese Election Campaign

Election of the Tokyo Metropolitan Assembly started a day before yesterday, and now towns are noisy since in Japan candidates are allowed to run around the towns by a campaign van while bawling out their name by a loudspeaker.

election campaign van

This way of election campaign is just annoying and doesn't make any sense to me.

Japanese style election campaign

What each candidate is trying to do seems to me just to make voters remember his/her name, but not a campaign pledge.

I'm not totally denying such an effort of a candidate, but it's also true (at least to me) that style of election campaign in Japan gives an impression to voters to fool us and demotivates voters to vote, which causes generally low voting rates in Japanese elections.

It is currently in discussion to introduce internet election campaign in Japan.  I have a positive view for the use of internet for election campaigns as it seems to provide more detailed information of each candidate, such as a campaign pledge, besides his/her name.

It is said that there have been globally known Japanese business people, but not such Japanese politicians.

We Japanese need to raise capable politicians by carefully watching what each candidate pledges and what s/he is actually doing after elected, and for that purpose we at least need an improved election system.

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