{"id":2803,"date":"2009-08-29T16:07:50","date_gmt":"2009-08-29T23:07:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/traveljapanblog.com\/wordpress\/?p=2803"},"modified":"2009-08-29T17:12:25","modified_gmt":"2009-08-30T00:12:25","slug":"election-day","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/traveljapanblog.com\/wordpress\/2009\/08\/election-day\/","title":{"rendered":"Election day"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"communist<\/a><\/p>\n

Tomorrow is election day in Japan. To that end the candidates have been out in full force since we arrived in Japan a couple weeks ago. The campaigns are somewhat different than in the U.S. Candidates run around town in cars, vans, and buses with loudspeakers saying their name, party, and\/or a message over and over again. Sometimes they’ll stop and give a speech from the top as the above photo shows. I took this picture in front of the Takadanobaba Station<\/a>.<\/p>\n

For those of you that can’t read Japanese, the political party sponsoring this van is none other than the Communist Party (\u5171\u7523\u515a or Kyosanto<\/i>). There is no majority party in Japan. The communists get about 7 or 8% of the vote. <\/p>\n

The two largest parties are \u81ea\u7531\u6c11\u4e3b\u515a or \u81ea\u6c11\u515a for short (frequently called the LDP in English). This party is most like the Republican Party in the states. \u6c11\u4e3b\u515a (Minshuto<\/I> or DPJ in English) is the one most like the Democratic Party in the U.S. Neither party gets more than 40%.<\/p>\n

\"japan<\/a><\/p>\n

Ads on the road are more controlled than in the states (thank goodness!) and can only be posted on boards set aside specifically for them. The above is an example.<\/p>\n

The guys on the lower corners will likely get the most votes since they belong to the LDP and DPJ so they don’t provide much of a message–just a name, picture, and party for the most part. The guy in the upper right corner is the communist. To try and garner the younger votes, I suppose, he lists his age on the poster as 33.<\/p>\n

The guy in the middle on the top has a long message to make. If you can read Japanese you can click on the above photo to get a bigger picture to read from. But the funnest one of all is the guy on the bottom in the middle. I’m guessing he is in a party of one. And what a party it is. The name of his political party is the Smile Party (\u30b9\u30de\u30a4\u30eb\u515a). He shows you just how happy he is with four pictures of himself smiling. Were I eligible to vote, I’d vote for him if I was certain he didn’t really have a chance of winning.<\/p>\n

\"kyosanto<\/a><\/p>\n

Here is another shot of the communists filling the air with noise pollution at incredible decibel levels.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Tomorrow is election day in Japan. To that end the candidates have been out in full force since we arrived in Japan a couple weeks ago. The campaigns are somewhat different than in the U.S. Candidates run around town in cars, vans, and buses with loudspeakers saying their name, party, and\/or a message over and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[5],"tags":[176],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/traveljapanblog.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2803"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/traveljapanblog.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/traveljapanblog.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/traveljapanblog.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/traveljapanblog.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2803"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/traveljapanblog.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2803\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2878,"href":"https:\/\/traveljapanblog.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2803\/revisions\/2878"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/traveljapanblog.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2803"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/traveljapanblog.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2803"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/traveljapanblog.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2803"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}