Elections in Japan
Prefectural and municipal assemblies are unicameral, the National Diet is bicameral, with the two houses on independent election cycles.
The minimum voting age in Japan's non-compulsory electoral system was reduced from 20 to 18 years in June 2016.
[1] General elections of members of the House of Representatives are usually held before the end of a four-year term as the chamber may be dissolved by the cabinet via the Emperor.
The only exception in post-war history was the "Lockheed Election" of 1976 in which the Liberal Democratic Party lost its seat majority for the first time.
The district magnitudes in the majoritarian tier vary between one and six, dependent on, but not fully proportional to the population of each prefecture.
Therefore, the single-member constituencies of the House of Councillors (参議院一人区, Sangiin ichinin-ku) are more likely to swing the election result and often receive more media and campaign attention.
The proportional election to the House of Councillors allows the voters to cast a preference vote for a single candidate on a party list.
Since the 2019 election, parties are allowed to prioritize individual candidates on their proportional list over voter preferences in a "special frame" (特定枠, tokutei-waku).
Between 1885 and 1947 in the Empire of Japan, the prime minister was not elected by the legislature, but responsible to, chosen and appointed by the Emperor.
[12] In the wake of the fundraising party kickback scandal, the ruling coalition faced polls predicting a loss of its majority.
In the result, the LDP-Kōmeitō coalition, while losing its majority, maintained a plurality strong enough to continue as a minority government, with DPFP and Ishin willing to cooperate in legislation on a case-by-case basis.
The CDP carried all three; amid extremely low approval ratings in the wake of the party kickback slush fund scandal, the LDP didn't contest Tokyo and Nagasaki (In Tokyo, Hirotada Ototake was supposed to be the LDP/Yuriko Koike affiliated candidate, but the LDP refused to endorse him), but also lost its previously unbroken "conservative kingdom" in Shimane.
In Nagasaki's 4th House of Representatives district where Seigo Kitamura (LDP) had died in May, Yōzō Kaneko (LDP – Kōmeitō), the son of former Nagasaki governor and senator Genjirō Kaneko, held the seat for the ruling coalition by 7 points over centre-left opposition candidate Seiichi Suetsugu (CDP – SDP).
The Tokushima-Kōchi senate seat had fallen vacant when Kōjirō Takano (LDP) had resigned after assaulting his secretary; the seat went to opposition-supported former Kōchi 2 House of Representatives member Hajime Hirota (I) who beat ruling coalition candidate Ken Nishiuchi (LDP – Kōmeitō) by more than 24 points.
The ruling coalition carried four, Nippon Ishin expanded beyond its Osaka base with an FPTP victory in Wakayama, the center-left opposition won none.
The House of Councillors by-election in Ōita, the most clear-cut one-on-one government/opposition contest of the evening, was decided in favour of government candidate Aki Shirasaka (LDP – Kōmeitō) by less than 400 votes over Tadatomo Yoshida (CDP – JCP, SDP).
The seat had been vacated in December 2021 by Shūji Yamada (LDP) for his (unsuccessful) candidacy in the gubernatorial election in March.
In the next forty-five years, the population became more than three-quarters urban, as people deserted rural communities to seek economic opportunities in Tokyo and other large cities.
The Supreme Court had ruled on several occasions that the imbalance violated the constitutional principle of one person-one vote.
[19] Still, according to the 6 October 2006 issue of the Japanese newspaper Daily Yomiuri, "the Supreme Court followed legal precedent in ruling Wednesday that the House of Councillors election in 2004 was held in a constitutionally sound way despite a 5.13-fold disparity in the weight of votes between the nation's most densely and most sparsely populated electoral districts".
In March 2011, the Grand Bench (daihōtei) of the Supreme Court ruled that the maximum discrepancy of 2.30 in voting weight between the Kōchi 3 and Chiba 4 constituencies in the 2009 election was in violation of the constitutionally guaranteed equality of all voters.
[21] In the meantime, another redistricting and apportionment passed in 2017 is designed to keep the maximum malapportionment ratio in the House of Representatives below 2.
[22] The malapportionment in the 2010[23] and 2013[24] regular House of Councillors elections was ruled unconstitutional (or "in an unconstitutional state") by the Supreme Court, and has been reduced by a 2015 reapportionment below 3 (at least in government statistics from census data which is regular and standardized but lags behind resident registration statistics and the actual number of eligible voters; using the latter, the maximum malapportionment in the 2016 election remained slightly above 3[25][26]).
Votes in national and most local elections are cast by writing the candidate's or party's name on a blank ballot paper.
In one extreme case, a rural single-member electoral district to the Shimane prefectural assembly, there hasn't been a contested election in 31 years (the whole Heisei period).
