Masakazu Sekiguchi Hiroyuki Nagahama Yukihiko Imasaki Kazuo Ueda

House of Councillors elections were held in Japan on 29 July 2001.

They were the first national elections since Junichiro Koizumi became Prime Minister after Yoshiro Mori resigned in April 2001.

The Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) and its election allies, were the major winner, provided Koizumi a strong mandates to move forward with his reform policies.

The ruling coalition performed well, and regain their majority in the House of Councillors.

The electoral reform enacted in 2000 became effective for the first time.

The number of Councillors per election was reduced by five, by two in the nationwide proportional representation and by one each in Okayama, Kumamoto and Miyazaki.

Instead of a party name, voters could now write the name of a single PR candidate on the ballot.

Some of these Councillors lost the official nomination of their party (e.g. in Niigata), others retired (Hokkaidō, Tochigi).

Most of these district split seats between ruling coalition and opposition again, in the case of both incumbents seeking re-election resulting in one of the two losing their seat (Nagano, Shizuoka).

Under this system, voters may vote for either a political party or a specific candidate.

The proportional seats are distributed among the parties by D'Hondt method according to their overall proportional votes, including candidate votes.

The results for the major parties were as follows (decimals omitted):[3][4] The final ranking of PR candidates and their individual vote counts were as follows: 1.

Shuichi Kato (NK) Elected candidates in bold Compiled from JANJAN's "The Senkyo"[5] and Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications official election results.