25
Mar
Political Campaign Season in Japan
Topic: Japan 2007, Politics
Maria expressing her opinion on the Tokyo governor’s race - yay for Asano, the reformer, and nay for Ishihara, the nationlist and incumbent.
We spent the day today in the small town Kawagoe, but I’m too worn out now and don’t have the energy to write about it or part 2 of my Day Off. I’ll get to those soon, but tonight I’ll write about politics, which is actually much easier for me to do (go figure).
Japanese political campaigns are very different from the US’. On the face of it, the Japanese constitution’s guarantee of free speech is similar to the US’. I don’t know the legal history, but it seems that the definition of “speech” here is much more narrowly defined than it is in the US. During campaign season here, politicians spend a lot of time making speeches near major train stations, and in that environment they can say just about anything they want, just like politicians in the US. The reason they spend so much time out on the street is that they can’t advertise on TV. Ads for political parties are allowed, but not for individual campaigns. Even the party ads are very limited in what they can say. They can’t attack their opponents, and they can’t say too much about all the great things they would do (as that’s just another way of making their opponents look bad). So the end result is typically short, banal ads showing one of the party leaders saying something like “Go Japan!”
The campaign season also has a defined starting date - candidates can’t campaign before that date. The current race for governor of Tokyo started a few days ago on March 22, and it ends on April 8 when the election is held. That means the campaign “season” is 17 days long. (Tokyo prefecture is roughly equivalent to a state in the US. The governor is sometimes referred to in the Western press incorrectly as the mayor. Tokyo has no mayor, as the city was technically abolished in 1943 - each of the 23 wards that made up the city now has its own government, with its own mayor). Campaign posters can go up on privately owned buildings as their owners sees fit, but posters in public spaces have to go on boards that are put up by the city specifically for that purpose. The picture above shows Maria and Kai in front of one of these boards, with Maria expressing her opinion on the race.
She’s giving the incumbent governor, Ishihara, thumbs down. He’s famous in Japan as the co-author of The Japan That Can Say No - a collections of essays from the late 80s arguing for Japan to be more independent from the US and more assertive in foreign affairs. “Ishihara is generally described as one of Japan’s most prominent ‘right-wing’ politicians. He has also generated controversy due to his support for Japanese nationalism, frequent visits to Yasukuni Shrine [where several convicted war criminals from World War II are interred] and several displays of alleged racism, historical revisionism and sexism.” Asano, the challenger, gets Maria’s thumbs up. “Asano earned a reputation as a committed reformist when he was governor of Miyagi Prefecture, and has promised to bring the same qualities to the job of running the nation’s capital …Asano says his vision includes more transparent government and greater consideration of the needs of the socially disadvantaged.” Bloomberg has an excellent summary of the race and some of the issues involved. (I’d also like to point out that the only article published by CNN so far on the race is deplorable. Ishihara and Asano - far and away the two top candidates - get nothing more than a shared sentence near the beginning of the article, and then a few sentences at the end. Almost the entire article is about the goofy dark horse candidates, because y’know, all Americans really want to hear about Japan is how crazy those Japanese are.)
Ishihara has been popular, but his popularity has fallen recently into the low 40s. With multiple candidates in the race that still gives him an edge, but not much of one. Maria tells me Asano has been smart in his campaign so far, directly going after Ishihara’s nationalism, which is a key source of his popularity. Asano has been pushing the question: how can Ishihara expect to achieve his goal of a more independent and globally respected Japan, when his sometimes racially charged and historically distorted rhetoric does little more than make the world mad at him and not want to deal with him?
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