The Election

Japan goes to the polls tomorrow in a snap national election. Or rather, most of Japan doesn't go to the polls tomorrow. There are two locked in certainties about this election: the first is that the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) led by their reactionary, nepotist, politically inbred prime minister Shinzo Abe, will win by a landslide. The second certainty is that voter turnout will be the lowest since the second world war. Here in Hokkaido the consensus is that less than 50% of the electorate will bother turning out and this could drop even further as we are due a bad blow on Sunday with forecasts of 40cms + of snow due to fall. No doubt the LDP will describe their victory as a 'mandate' from 'the Japanese people' to continue their course of fiscal mismanagement and insulting nationalism, but the real winner of the election will be 'apathy'. Which is a pity as the last thing this country needs is a continuing disengagement, particularly by young people, from how the country is politically governed. And the problems are mounting. Earlier this month saw a second successive quarter of minus GDP growth which meant that Japan was officially in recession. The Yen has fallen off a cliff and is now worth 40% less against the dollar than it was in December 2012 (when Abe came to power). This great news for the nation's exporters (accounting for 14% of GDP), whereas consumers (accounting for 61%), who are heavily dependent on imports particularly of oil and food, have been hammered. But because Japanese consumers increasingly don't vote, the LDP really doesn't care. It does care about farmers, and old people, and especially old farmers as these are the sort of people who do vote, so more central heated community centers for pensioners in small, rural villages where the average age is 75+, whereas in towns and cities the waiting lists for kindergarten continue to grow while class sizes in schools are set to increase from 35 to 40 pupils.
Unfortunately, I don't get to vote - apparently "no taxation without representation" doesn't translate into Japanese. Mind you that didn't stop the local LDP candidate, one Manabu Horie (or 'Kojack' as I like to call him) sending me a postcard appealing for my vote. I am not sure what this says about Kojack's, sorry, Horie-san's political acumen, but he obviously knows feck all about the Japanese constitution. Sources close to the one person in Teach Gaynor-Takahashi who does have the vote has said she plans to cast in favor of the communist party candidate. If, it isn't snowing too heavily...