Japanese Upper House Election: Taro Yamamoto Won Seat in Tokyo With 4th Highest Votes, Communist Party Increased Seats Significantly

LDP and Komei won 76 seats together, bringing the overall number of seats in the Upper House (including the seats not contested this time) to 135, well past the simple majority of 121. DPJ collapsed from pre-election 44 to only 17, even though it is still the 2nd largest party overall.

It was almost funny to see the media, both newspapers and TV, keep telling the voters throughout the day and evening on July 21 (the election day) that the voter turnout was going to be so low that it would be the record-low. Here's Mainichi, saying the voter turnout as of 6PM was only 32.64%, and it was low across the nation. However, Yomiuri reports that the final turnout two hours later at 8PM was 52%. It is still low, but above 50% and not the record-low like the media has been telling the voters. It seems 20% of voters showed up in the last two hours of voting, except for places where the voting was finished earlier (35% of all voting stations nationwide).

Anyhow... Here's the election results, per Asahi Shinbun (English labels are by me):

And the results of Tokyo, per Yomiuri Shinbun, showing Taro Yamamoto close 4th after a Japanese Communist Party candidate (a 30-year-old woman), beating an experienced LDP politician (who still won the seat) and beating a DPJ candidate who was supported by many "famous" and "well-known" people but couldn't win the seat:

What's not so good is this, also from Asahi - overall numbers of Upper House Councilors of each party. To LDP and Komei, add Boy-wonder's Japan Restoration Party and Your Party whose policies are hardly different from those of LDP; you get the two-thirds majority, enough to change the Constitution. Abe has already declared that what he is going to do, now that he has the "mandate", having won both Houses of the Diet.

For sure, Komei Party says it is against the radical change of the Constitution as proposed by LDP, but it still wants to modify certain clauses. There are DPJ politicians who are for changing the Constitution.

After the win of Yamamoto was confirmed, I was surprised to see some of the influential experts on Twitter resorted to propagating totally false information about Yamamoto. They are people who think the fear of radioactive contamination in Japan and particularly in Fukushima Prefecture is way overblown. As far as I have followed, they have so far not resorted to manufacturing a lie about people they do not agree with, and they are usually the ones who appreciate accuracy in data.

But not this time. One such expert tweeted that Taro Yamamoto is "racist" (against people in Fukushima, he means; at least he doesn't use the transliterated katakana word) because Yamamoto just said in an NHK interview that the agricultural produce in Fukushima was nuclear waste. Yamamoto said no such thing, as it turned out. He said 100 Bq/kg contamination had been considered nuclear waste until the Fukushima accident, and after the Fukushima accident it is the safety limit for food.

I have problems myself with some of Yamamoto's opinions and understanding of things, but I didn't expect these experts to manufacture a lie like this to attack someone they don't agree with.

The other phenom in the election, Yohei Miyake, didn't win in the proportional representation part of the election for the Green Party, but he got over 150,000 votes (the highest in the Green Party). He has declared he will run again in three years in the Upper House election, and says he's glad his movement contributed to the win by Yamamoto.

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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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Japanese Upper House Election: Taro Yamamoto Doesn't Need Teleprompter to Appeal to Voters

He knows his stuff forwards and backwards, it seems.

Taro Yamamoto, a 38-year-old actor turned activist turned aspiring politician, is in the race from Tokyo. He lost in the December 2012 Lower House Election against Shintaro Ishihara's son, but he managed to get more than 70,000 votes which was very significant in that particular district in Tokyo.

He relies only on volunteers for his election campaign, and from Day 1 they have been out on the streets. Yamamoto is running as independent. It's a tough race in Tokyo, with 20 candidates vying for 5 slots and LDP expected to win 2.

I think he originally planned to run as a nation-wide candidate in the proportional representation part of the election, but somehow that fell apart. I think it had to do with him not part of an established party.

It will be a blast if Yamamoto wins...

From his website, here are his three simple core policies and election promises:

1. No one will be exposed to radiation.
2. No Transpacific Partnership (TPP)
3. No one will go hungry.

He is about the only one candidate I know who has been speaking about the danger of radiation exposure from contaminated food and contaminated environment, and demanding government action to stop distribution and sales of contaminated food and goods (such as cement mixed with ashes that contain radioactive cesium).

For that alone, he has my support.

His website: http://imahahitori.com/
His Twitter: @yamamototaro0
His campaign live cast: http://twitcasting.tv/yamamototaro0

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Japanese Election OT: Just Wondering How Taro Yamamoto Is Faring in Tokyo's 8th District...

About 8 more hours of voting time left (until 8PM) in Japan.

Taro Yamamoto, the actor turned anti-nuclear activist who has been not just against nuclear power plants in general (like Japan Future Party and others) but against disaster debris burning, against contaminated food, against keeping children in Fukushima Prefecture and who is in favor of spending everything to clean up the mess even if it means national bankruptcy is running for office from the 8th District in Sugimani-ku, Tokyo.

Kenji Sawada, known as "Julie" for generations of fans since 1960s, showed up in one of Yamamoto's campaign events on December 14, and urged the excited audience to vote for this "fine young man" who has stepped up to the plate to stop the nukes.

I remember Yamamoto saying in one of the TV variety shows last year, "We should do everything, spend all the money necessary, to clean up this mess, help people and children in the affected area. Even if the country goes bankrupt as the result, as long as we have people, we can start again." He was roundly ridiculed by other guests at that time, as "unrealistic", as someone who didn't know anything about economics.

It made sense to me.

One of my favorite songs by Julie, from 1971, when he was a teenage girls' "idol". How time has passed. He still sings today, just like this, in the same key.

Toward the wind
Wearing leather shoes
We walk side by side
On a long road

My map is torn
No one here to give me a new one
So we walk, holding each other around the shoulder
On a long road

When you feel down
I will sing you a song
Carrying you across the sea at night
I will be the boat

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