Politics

During our first month in Japan, elections for representatives were in progress. Unlike in the U.S. all advertisement seemed to be out of the home. In the U.S., supporters of a particular party or candidate put stickers on their cars and signs in their front yard. Also the television is exploding with advertisements. In Japan the closets I’ve seen of politics in private life is in the news paper and television trivia games. Instead political parties and candidates are displayed out in public. Boards are posted up all over the city (and prefecture) with the pictures and names of the candidates. Above is a picture of this. Additional posters are sometimes displayed by individual candidates. However the most obvious form of advertisement for candidates are the vans. I’m not sure what the name of these vans are so I’m going to call them candidate vans. These vans are covered in posters displaying the name and or picture of a candidate. A loud speaker is shouting out the name of the candidate and usually about four people sometimes including the candidate (I believe) are sitting in the van waving out to the people they pass on the road. Occasionally a similar group of people stands on a busy street corner however the vans seem more popular.



The people in Japan don’t seem very connected to passionate about politics in Japan. My host mother explains this by saying that the average person is not directly connected to the prime minister. In elections for the prime minister, the representative is voted on by the Japanese citizen and then this representative will vote for the prime minister (if I have this correct). Another reason for this distance between the people and the prime minister is because the prime ministers are rotated through very quickly. On a television game show Japan ranked extremely low on their approval rating of their prime minister. The approval rating was around 18%. On another game show, celebrities are regularly put into teams and participate in trivia games. One of these is to name things in a category. A picture of this is above. In this shot, the question asking the contestants to name current prime ministers in the world. Often questions will be on Japan’s politics, especially prime ministers, as there are so many and are not always “household names.”