Japanese Upper House Election: Japanese Communist Party, Miyake and Yamamoto Attracting Huge Crowd on the Last Day of Campaign, Voting Has Started

(UPDATE 7/21/2013) Sure enough, both Taro Yamamoto and Japanese Communist Party won big in the election. See my new post.

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The media has been hammering the idea for the past two weeks that the voter turnout will be a record low this time.

As many as 16,958 out of the total 48,777 voting stations in the country, or 35% of the voting stations, will close earlier than mandated by the law.

The crowd for the existing, mainstream parties (LDP, DPJ, Komei) did seem low during the election campaign. So much so that to sum up the election coverage, Kyodo News used the aerial photo of a large crowd outside the Shinjuku Station in Tokyo without naming the campaigner. The Kyodo article was mostly about LDP and Abe's promise. You would think the crowd was Abe's crowd.

Well, the photo turned out to be not LDP, DPJ, Komei, or Boy-wonder's dwindling party, but Japanese Communist Party.

From the tweet of JCP Chairman Kazuo Shii, who says 3,500 people stopped to listen to his party's last appeal:

There were many on Kyodo's site and on Twitter claiming it was the crowd for Taro Yamamoto. I retweeted one of such tweets, then my eyes got fixated with the three characters (小田急) in the upper left corner of the Kyodo photo. That's Odakyu Department Store, and that means the exit is Shinjuku West. After quick search I noticed that could only be JPC, and it was.

Asahi had this aerial photo of an even bigger crowd in Shibuya. Whose campaign was this? Taro Yamamoto and Yohei Miyake. But following Kyodo, Asahi didn't bother telling the readers whose campaign it was that attracted what Professor Yukio Hayakawa described as 10,000-strong crowd (Professor Hayakawa was right there in the crowd, according to his own tweet, and he says there were more people across the street):

(Image of Asahi Shinbun paper, from Professor Hayakawa's tweet)

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Yohei Miyake Energizes Young (and Young at Heart) Voters for a Seat in Japan's Upper House

34-year-old Yohei Miyake is an highly popular and acclaimed reggae-rock musician in Japan. He's running for a seat in the Upper House of the National Diet for the Green party in the proportional representation part of the election.

Along with Taro Yamamoto, who is running from Tokyo, Miyake seems to be winning young voters and not-so-young voters who have never bothered with elections with the message he delivers with his guitar.

He speaks as he plays guitar, and occasionally breaks into singing - in the centuries-old Japanese tradition of emotive story-telling with a string instrument.

I've heard about him, but I never bothered to view his election appearances until one of my Twitter followers sent me a video with English subtitle. (Like, just now.)

I was shocked to see a nice-looking man who looks to have actually grown into adulthood, instead of simply getting old with the wrinkled face of an elementary school boy (like so many of politicians and so many of so-called elite bureaucrats and corporate executives in Japan).

I was shocked again when I saw a huge audience at the end of the video. You don't see that kind of crowd at campaign speeches by established parties.

From Miyake's appearance in Kichijoji, Tokyo on the first day of the election campaign on July 4, 2013, with English subtitle:

The large crowd doesn't necessarily translate into votes, but I sense the audience is feeling empowered by him, which is rare in Japan.

His official slogan at his official site says, "Turn all weapons into musical instruments." Being a musician myself, I'm all for that. I do not agree with many of his policies, but that doesn't really matter.

(In fact, I quite disagree with some of his policies, particularly one about consumption tax. He proposes tax on financial assets instead of consumption tax. That's Cyprus, and that's unfair double-taxation on people who saved their earnings post-tax, just because these people have bank accounts and investment accounts that are big enough for the government to plunder. I don't know what rate he is thinking of.)

Official blog (Japanese only): http://ameblo.jp/miyake-yohei/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/MIYAKE_YOHEI

Like Yamamoto's, Miyake's campaign organization is made up of all volunteers.

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