July 30, 2016•Update: July 30, 2016
By Todd Crowell
TOKYO
The citizens of Japan’s capital could be forgiven for feeling election fatigue. They will troop to the polls July 31 to choose the third governor since 2012, just coming off a national election held only a couple weeks ago.
It used to be that the prime minister’s office was the revolving door but not the governor. Since the war Japan has had 33 premiers, while Tokyo has had only 8 executives. One governor, Shunichi Suzuki (1979-1995), served 16 years and transformed the city.
Of late, however, two governors have resigned before the end of their term, Naoki Inose (2012 - 2013) and most recently, Yoichi Masuzoe. The latter resigned after a magazine disclosed he had misused campaign funds to purchase luxuries.
Arch conservative Shintaro Ishihara served three full terms as governor but resigned in the middle of his fourth term to re-enter national politics.
The latest election has attracted three B-list candidates, including Yuriko Koiki, 64, a former minister of defense, Shuntaro Torigone, 76, a television anchorman, and Hiroya Masuda, 64, a former internal affairs minister.
Polls show Masuda trailing the other two, but about 40 percent of Tokyo’s 10 million voters tell pollsters they are undecided. Eighteen others have filed to run but haven’t excited the voters.
Koike, the slight front-runner, is a member of the governing Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) but is running as an independent. The LDP and its coalition partner Komeito are backing third-place Masuda.
She is said to have widespread support among women as she would be Tokyo’s first female governor should she win.
Torigone is backed by the opposition coalition consisting of the Democratic Party, the Japanese Communist Party, and two smaller groupings. He is banking on the split in conservative ranks to win.
If Trigone should win it would be a major boost to opposition morale, following its defeat in the recent election to the upper house, not to mention two national landslide elections that swept the LDP into power.
The journalist got some bad publicity, however, when the magazine Shukan Bunshun accused Torigone of making unwanted advances toward women. He has sued the magazine for libel, darkly claiming “there is a political force at work here”.
There seem to be few major issues at stake in this election, which hasn’t attracted much public attention. That was in contrast with the 2014 election which saw former reform Prime Minister Morihiro Hosokawa try and fail to win on an anti-nuclear power plank.
Masuda is running on the experience he said he gained by 12 years as governor of Iwate prefecture in northern Japan. It is an oddity of Japan that Tokyo attracts former governors of other prefectures as candidates. Hosokawa was a governor of Kumamoto.
The Tokyo electorate is very volatile and subject to picking the candidate whose name they recognize. The real party apparatus in the capital does not usually count for much.
Five years ago a television personality Yukio Aoshima, known for the television character Nasty Granny, ran for governor.
All he spent was his $200 filing fee and he made no campaign appearances.
He won in a landslide.
The winner will preside over a city of 12 million people, a budget larger than that of Sweden, a civil service of 168,000 people and a gross domestic product greater than most middle-sized countries.
