It was formed pursuant to a 2015 revision of the Public Officers Election Law from a merger of the Tottori and Shimane at-large districts, the two smallest districts in the country, to address the imbalance in representation between rural and urban voters.
[1] The district has 1,068,348 registered voters (as of September 2016)[2] and was contested for the first time at the House of Councillors election that was held on 10 July 2016.
[3] Hamada, aware of the difficulty he faced in defeating Aoki, resigned from the Party for Japanese Kokoro in April 2016 and joined Initiatives from Osaka the same month, receiving their nomination to contest the election from the national proportional representation block.
[5] In the Tottori-Shimane district, the opposition block endorsed Tottori native Hirohiko Fukushima [ja], a former director-general of the Consumer Affairs Agency and former mayor of Abiko, Chiba.
[6] The third candidate in the election was Shimane native Bunta Kokuryō of the Happiness Realization Party.