Elections in Japan

The Japanese political process has two types of elections.

While the national level features a parliamentary system of government where the head of government is elected indirectly by the legislature, prefectures and municipalities employ a presidential system where chief executives and legislative assemblies are directly elected, independently from each other. Many of the prefectural and municipal elections are held together in since 1947, held in years before leap years; but since each election cycle of every chief executive or assembly of any prefecture or municipality is independent and not reset after resignations/deaths/recalls/no-confidence votes/dissolutions/municipal mergers, there are also many non-unified local elections today. Prefectural and municipal assemblies are unicameral, the National Diet is bicameral, with the two houses on independent election cycles.

Rules and regulations, supervision

Both national & local elections are regulated by the of 1950.

Elections are supervised by Election Administration Commissions at each administrative level under the general direction of the Central Election Management Council, an extraordinary organ attached to the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications (MIC). The minimum voting age in Japan's non-compulsory electoral system was reduced from 20 to 18 years in June 2016. Voters must satisfy a three-month residency requirement before being allowed to cast a ballot.

For those seeking offices, there are two sets of age requirements: twenty-five years of age for admission to the House of Representatives and most local offices, and thirty years of age for admission to the House of Councillors and the prefectural governorship. Each deposit for candidacy for national election is 3 million yen (about 27 thousand dollars) for a single-seat constituency and 6 million yen (about 54 thousand dollars) for proportional representation.

National elections

National elections include:

, held every four years unless the lower house is dissolved earlier to elect all members of the House of Representatives at once.
, held every three years in staggered elections to six-year terms with half of the membership up in each class.
to fill vacant majoritarian seats
after an election has been invalidated, e.g. by a winner missing the legal vote quorum or after election law violations

Japan's post-WWII national legislature, the , has two directly elected chambers, elected on independent electoral cycles:

House of Representatives

The has 465 members, elected for a rarely completed four-year term, 289 members in single-seat constituencies and 176 members by proportional representation in 11 regional "block" constituencies. Each voter votes twice, once for a candidate in the local constituency, and once for a party in the regional "block" constituency. In a parallel system, there is no link between votes in one tier and seat numbers in the other; but so-called of one candidate in both tiers simultaneously are allowed. If such dual candidates lose in the majoritarian tier, they still have a chance to be elected in the proportional block. Parties may also place dual district and block candidates on the same list rank; in that case, the system determines the order of candidates.

House of Councillors

The has 245 members (248 from 2022), elected for a fixed six-year term, 147 (2022–: 148) members by single non-transferable vote (SNTV) in 45 single- and multi-seat constituencies (most are prefectures, two combined constituencies comprise two neighbouring prefectures each) and 98 (2022–: 100) by proportional representation (by D'Hondt method) with optionally open lists in a single, nationwide constituency.

Regular/Ordinary elections of members of the House of Councillors are held once every three years. In staggered elections, half of the House of Councillors comes up for election every three years in elections. The term is fixed, the House of Councillors cannot be dissolved. This, too, is a parallel electoral system. Dual candidacies are not allowed. As in House of Representatives elections, voters have two votes: In the majoritarian election, the vote has to be for a candidate, but in the proportional election, the vote may be for either a party list or a single candidate; in the latter case, the vote counts as both a vote for the party list (to determine proportional seat distribution), and as a preference vote within that list (to determine the order or proportional candidates within that list). The district magnitudes in the majoritarian tier vary between one and six, dependent on, but not fully proportional to the population of each prefecture. In single-member constituencies, SNTV becomes equivalent to first-past-the-post, whereas seats are usually split between different parties/alliances in multi-member constituencies (and in the proportional constituency by definition). Therefore, the are more likely to swing the election result and often receive more media and campaign attention. The proportional election to the House of Councillors allows the voters to cast a preference vote for a single candidate on a party list. The preference votes strictly determined the ranking of candidates on party lists before 2019. Since the 2019 election, parties are allowed to prioritize individual candidates on their proportional list over voter preferences in a . In the 2019 election, almost all parties continued to use completely open lists; exceptions were the LDP which used the "special frame" to give secure list spots to two LDP prefectural federations affected by the introduction of combined constituencies in 2016, Reiwa Shinsengumi which used it to give secure list spots to two candidates with severe disabilities, and the minor "Labourers' Party for the liberation of labour".

thumb|Voting in [[Higashiōsaka, Osaka Prefecture, Japan, 2014]]

Double elections

The electoral cycles of the two chambers of the Diet are usually not synchronized. When the 1947 constitution came into effect, the first House of Councillors election was held several days apart from the 23rd House of Representatives election. Only in 1980 and 1986, general and regular election coincided on the same day because the House of Representatives was dissolved in time for the election to be scheduled together with the House of Councillors election in early summer.

By- and repeat elections

Vacant district seats in both Houses are generally filled in by-elections. Nowadays, these are usually scheduled in April and October as necessary. Vacant proportional seats in both Houses and district seats in the House of Councillors that fall vacant within three months of a regular election are filled by : the highest ranking candidate on a proportional list or in the electoral district who was not elected and is not disqualified takes the seat. Disqualifications may, for example, happen if a candidate for the House of Councillors runs for the House of Representatives or vice versa, or after a violation of campaign laws.

Election of the Prime Minister

Between 1885 and 1947 in the Empire of Japan, the prime minister was not elected by the legislature, but responsible to, chosen and appointed by the Emperor. In practice, the usually nominated a candidate for appointment. The and its elected lower house, the House of Representatives, which were set up in 1890 according to the Imperial Constitution, had no constitutionally guaranteed role in the formation of cabinets.

Since 1947, the Prime Minister has been chosen in the (ja) in the National Diet. It is held after a cabinet has submitted its resignation – the outgoing cabinet remains as caretaker cabinet until the Imperial inauguration ceremony of a new prime minister –; a cabinet must resign en masse under the constitution (Articles 69 and 70) 1. always on convocation of the first Diet after a general election of the House of Representatives, 2. if the post of prime minister has fallen vacant – that includes cases when the prime minister is permanently incapacitated, e.g. by illness, kidnapping or defection –, or 3. if a no-confidence vote in the House of Representatives is not answered by the dissolution of the chamber. Though both Houses of the Diet vote in two-round elections to select a prime minister, the House of Representatives has the decisive vote: If the two Houses vote for different candidates (as they did in 1948, 1989, 1998, 2007 and 2008), a procedure in the may reach a consensus; but eventually the candidate of the House of Representatives becomes that of the whole Diet and thereby prime minister-designate. The designated prime minister must still be ceremonially appointed by the Emperor in the to enter office; but unlike some heads of state, the Emperor has no reserve power to appoint anyone other than the person elected by the Diet.

In 2001, LDP president and Prime Minister Junichirō Koizumi instituted an advisory council to investigate the possibility of introducing direct popular election of the prime minister in a constitutional revision.

Latest results

2026 local elections

2026 House of Representatives election

2025 House of Councillors election

Held in July 2025, the ruling coalition of the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) and Komeito lost its majority in the House of Councillors. The LDP’s national vote share fell to 21.6%, the lowest result in the party’s history. The coalition’s decline was driven by growing support for smaller opposition parties. LDP party president and prime minister Shigeru Ishiba would eventually announce his intention to resign in September 2025.

List of national elections

Apportionment

In the 1980s, apportionment of electoral districts still reflected the distribution of the population in the years following World War II, when only one-third of the people lived in urban areas and two thirds lived in rural areas. In the next forty-five years, the population became more than three-quarters urban, as people deserted rural communities to seek economic opportunities in Tokyo and other large cities. The lack of reapportionment led to a serious underrepresentation of urban voters. Urban districts in the House of Representatives were increased by five in 1964, bringing nineteen new representatives to the lower house; in 1975 six more urban districts were established, with a total of twenty new representatives allocated to them and to other urban districts. Yet great inequities remained between urban and rural voters.

In the early 1980s, as many as five times the votes were needed to elect a representative from an urban district compared with those needed for a rural district. Similar disparities existed in the prefectural constituencies of the House of Councillors. The Supreme Court had ruled on several occasions that the imbalance violated the constitutional principle of one person-one vote. The Supreme Court mandated the addition of eight representatives to urban districts and the removal of seven from rural districts in 1986. Several lower house districts' boundaries were redrawn. Yet the disparity was still as much as three urban votes to one rural vote.

After the 1986 change, the average number of persons per lower house representative was 236,424. However, the figure varied from 427,761 persons per representative in the fourth district of Kanagawa Prefecture, which contains the large city of Yokohama, to 142,932 persons in the third district of largely rural and mountainous Nagano Prefecture.

The 1993 reform government under Hosokawa Morihiro introduce a new electoral system whereby 200 members (reduced to 180 beginning with the 2000 election) are elected by proportional representation in multi-member districts or "blocs" while 300 are elected from single-candidate districts.

The 2009 general House of Representatives election was the first unconstitutional lower house election since the introducion of the new electoral system in 1994 (parallel voting and "small" FPTP single-member electoral districts/"Kakumander"). In March 2011, the Grand Bench (daihōtei) of the Supreme Court ruled that the maximum discrepancy of 2.30 in voting weight between the Kōchi 3 and Chiba 4 constituencies in the 2009 election was in violation of the constitutionally guaranteed equality of all voters. As in previous such rulings on unconstitutional elections (1972, 1980, 1983 and 1990 Representatives elections, 1992 Councillors election), the election is not invalidated, but the imbalance has to be corrected by the Diet through redistricting and/or reapportionment of seats between prefectures.

In 2016, a panel of experts proposed to introduce the [John Quincy] Adams apportionment method (method of smallest divisors) for apportioning House of Representatives seats to prefectures. The reform is planned to be implemented after the 2020 census figures are available and not expected to take effect before 2022. In the meantime, another redistricting and apportionment passed in 2017 is designed to keep the maximum malapportionment ratio in the House of Representatives below 2. In the FPTP tier, it changes 97 districts and cuts six without adding any; in the proportional tier, four "blocks" lose a seat each; the total number of seats in the lower house is cut to 465, 289 majoritarian seats and 176 proportional seats.

The malapportionment in the 2010 and 2013 regular House of Councillors elections was ruled unconstitutional (or "in an unconstitutional state") by the Supreme Court, and has been reduced by a 2015 reapportionment below 3 (at least in government statistics from census data which is regular and standardized but lags behind resident registration statistics and the actual number of eligible voters; using the latter, the maximum malapportionment in the 2016 election remained slightly above 3).

{| class="wikitable"

|+Electoral districts with the highest and lowest voting weight for the National Diet as of 2016

! colspan="5" | House of Representatives

! colspan="5" | House of Councillors

! colspan="2" | Lowest vote weight

! colspan="2" | Highest vote weight

! colspan="2" | Lowest vote weight

! colspan="2" | Highest vote weight

! #

! District !! Registered voters

! District !! Registered voters per member elected

! #

| 1

| Tokyo 1 || align="right" | 514,974

| Fukushima 4 || align="right" | 233,491

| Saitama || align="right" | 1,015,543

| Fukui || align="right" | 328,772

| 1

| 2

| Hokkaidō 1 || align="right" | 505,510

| Miyagi 5 || align="right" | 234,373

| Niigata || align="right" | 978,686

| Saga || align="right" | 346,727

| 2

| 3

| Tokyo 3 || align="right" | 504,929

| Kagoshima 5 || align="right" | 240,056

| Miyagi || align="right" | 975,466

| Yamanashi || align="right" | 353,402

| 3

| 4

| Tokyo 5 || align="right" | 498,903

| Tottori 1 || align="right" | 240,874

| Kanagawa || align="right" | 951,735

| Kagawa || align="right" | 417,082

| 4

| 5

| Hyōgo 6 || align="right" | 492,173

| Nagasaki 3 || align="right" | 242,165

| Tokyo || align="right" | 937,470

| Wakayama || align="right" | 419,011

| 5

| 6

| Tokyo 6 || align="right" | 490,674

| Tottori 2 || align="right" | 242,194

| Osaka || align="right" | 915,000

| Akita || align="right" | 448,236

| 6

| 7

| Tokyo 19 || align="right" | 488,494

| Nagasaki 4 || align="right" | 242,303

| Nagano || align="right" | 885,638

| Toyama || align="right" | 452,822

| 7

| 8

| Tokyo 22 || align="right" | 486,965

| Aomori 3 || align="right" | 244,007

| Chiba || align="right" | 871,110

| Miyazaki || align="right" | 466,829

| 8

| 9

| Saitama 3 || align="right" | 483,014

| Mie 4 || align="right" | 244,825

| Gifu || align="right" | 850,190

| Yamagata || align="right" | 475,419

| 9

| 10

| Tokyo 23 || align="right" | 481,206

| Iwate 3 || align="right" | 246,272

| Tochigi || align="right" | 827,368

| Ishikawa || align="right" | 481,027

| 10

Prefectural and local elections

Local elections include:

Prefectural elections
on an independent four-year cycle
, general elections are held on an independent four-year cycle
Municipal elections
on an independent four-year cycle
, general elections are held on an independent four-year cycle

There are 47 prefectures (-to/-dō/-fu/-ken) of Japan since 1888, they are contiguously subdivided into 1741 municipalities (-shi/-ku/-chō/-son) since 2014 (see Administrative divisions of Japan).

Unified elections

are held once every four years. Prefectural assemblies and governors, as well as mayors and assemblies in municipalities, are elected for four-year terms. In April 1947, all local elections in the 46 prefectures (excluding Okinawa Prefecture, then under US military rule) and all their municipalities were held at the same time in "unified local elections". Since then, some gubernatorial and mayoral elections, and most assembly elections, have stayed on this original four-year cycle. Most governors and mayors are now elected on different schedules as the four-year cycle "resets" upon the resignation, death or removal of a sitting governor or mayor. Some assembly election cycles have also shifted due to assembly dissolutions or mergers of municipalities.

The most recent were the 2023 Japanese unified local elections.

As of 2015, the major contests in the unified local elections are as follows:

{| class="wikitable" style="text-align:center;"

!Prefecture

!Governor

!Assembly

!Designated city races

|Hokkaido

|♦

|Sapporo mayor Sapporo assembly

|Aomori

|♦

|Akita

|♦

|Yamagata

|♦

|Tochigi

|♦

|Gunma

|♦

|Saitama

|♦

|Saitama assembly

|Chiba

|♦

|Chiba assembly

|Kanagawa

|♦

|Yokohama assembly Kawasaki assembly Sagamihara mayor Sagamihara assembly

|Niigata

|♦

|Niigata assembly

|Toyama

|♦

|Ishikawa

|♦

|Fukui

|♦

|Yamanashi

|♦

|Nagano

|♦

|Gifu

|♦

|Shizuoka

|♦

|Shizuoka mayor Hamamatsu mayor Hamamatsu assembly

|Aichi

|♦

|Nagoya assembly

|Mie

|♦

|Shiga

|♦

|Kyoto

|♦

|Kyoto assembly

|Osaka

|♦

|Osaka assembly Sakai assembly

|Hyōgo

|♦

|Kobe assembly

|Nara

|♦

|Wakayama

|♦

|Tottori

|♦

|Shimane

|♦

|Okayama

|♦

|Okayama assembly

|Hiroshima

|♦

|Hiroshima mayor Hiroshima assembly

|Yamaguchi

|♦

|Tokushima

|♦

|Kagawa

|♦

|Ehime

|♦

|Kōchi

|♦

|Fukuoka

|♦

|Fukuoka assembly

|Saga

|♦

|Nagasaki

|♦

|Kumamoto

|♦

|Kumamoto assembly

|Oita

|♦

|Miyazaki

|♦

|Kagoshima

|♦

Although Tokyo's metropolitan governor and assembly elections are currently held on separate schedules, 21 of the 23 special wards of Tokyo follow the unified election schedule for their assembly elections, the only exceptions being Katsushika and Adachi. The majority of Tokyo's special wards follow separate cycles for their mayoral elections. Tokyo elected its governor as part of the unified elections until 2011, but was forced to hold a 2012 election and 2014 election due to the resignations of Shintaro Ishihara and Naoki Inose.

Iwate Prefecture, Miyagi Prefecture and Fukushima Prefecture are no longer on the unified election cycle due to the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami, which delayed their elections.

;List of unified local elections

2007 Japanese unified local elections
2011 Japanese unified local elections
2015 Japanese unified local elections
2019 Japanese unified local elections
2023 Japanese unified local elections

Other major local election cycles

Since 1971, Ibaraki Prefecture has held its prefectural assembly elections in the December preceding the unified election, making this election a regular leading indicator of the nationwide elections in the following April. The 2014 Ibaraki election was held on the same day as the 2014 Japanese general election.
Approximately 193 new municipalities were created in a wave of "Heisei mergers" effective in April 2005. Their first municipal elections were held around this time, and coincided with the Chiba and Akita gubernatorial elections and the Nagoya mayoral election, creating a second major local election cycle sometimes referred to as the "mini unified local elections".
Okinawa Prefecture and most of its local governments continue to follow a four-year cycle that began following repatriation to Japan in June 1972, with several exceptions (including the city of Naha). Okinawa elections generally occur in the year following the unified elections; the next is scheduled for June 2016.

Ballots, voting machines and early voting

thumb|A used Japanese ballot paper from the 1952 House of Representatives election, in this case spoilt by writing . The only thing that is literally "on the ballot" in Japan before a voter votes is an empty box titled and usually a text next to it with general notes such as "Please don't write anything other than the name of an actual candidate." or "Please don't write outside the box."

thumb|A sample ballot paper for a House of Representatives election according to a 1945 Home Ministry ordinance

Votes in national and most local elections are cast by writing the candidate's or party's name on a blank ballot paper. In elections for the House of Representatives voters fill in two ballots, one with the name of their preferred district candidate and one with their preferred party in the proportional representation block. For the House of Councillors, the district vote is similar (in SNTV multi-member districts, several candidates can be elected, but every voter has only one vote). But in the proportional vote for the House of Councillors votes are cast for a party list (to determine how many proportional seats a party receives) or a candidate (which additionally influences which candidates are elected from a party's list).

Ballots that cannot unambiguously be assigned to a candidate are not considered invalid, but are assigned to all potentially intended candidates proportionally to the unambiguous votes each candidate has received. These so-called are rounded to the third decimal. For example, if "Yamada A" and "Yamada B" both stood in an election and there were 1500 unambiguous votes: 1000 for "Yamada A" and 500 for "Yamada B"; five ambiguous votes for "Yamada" would then count for Yamada A as 5×1000/1500=3.333 votes, and for Yamada B as 5×500/1500=1.667 votes. The official overall result would then be: Yamada A 1003.333 votes, Yamada B 501.667 votes.

In 2002, passage of an electronic voting law allowed for the introduction of electronic voting machines in local elections. The first machine vote took place in Niimi, Okayama in June 2002. In 2003, a system for was introduced. In the 2017 general/House of Representatives election, a record number of more than 21 million Japanese voted early; at the same time overall turnout was low (the second lowest in history), so in 2017, roughly 38% of all actual voters had voted early. For regular/House of Councillors elections, the 2019 election set a new all-time high with more than 17 million early voters, corresponding to roughly a third of actual voters in 2019 as overall turnout hit the second lowest value in history.

Walkovers

In Japan, walkovers in elections are called , "[being] elected without vote". And there is literally no vote held in a walkover in Japan, no way to vote "no" or abstain explicitly: If there are only as many candidates in an election as there are seats/offices at the start of the legal election period ("official announcement": in national general and regular elections; in prefectural and municipal elections as well as national by-elections), they are declared the winners. But the otherwise applicable moratorium period after regular elections on recall attempts does not apply after a walkover. (Recalls are a two-/three-step procedure: first, supporters of a recall must collect a sufficient number of signatures; if they do, a referendum is held on whether or not to recall the incumbent; only if that is accepted by a majority, a fresh election is scheduled.) Article 100 of the Public Offices Election Law deals with walkovers, there are additional walkover provisions for subnational elections in the Local Autonomy Law.

Walkovers have become widespread in prefectural and municipal elections in recent years; in the 2019 unified local elections, out of 2277 seats up in 945 electoral districts for 41 prefectural assemblies, a record 612 seats are won by walkovers in a total of 371 districts or 39% of all electoral districts. In one extreme case, a rural single-member electoral district to the Shimane prefectural assembly, there hasn't been a contested election in 31 years (the whole Heisei period).

References

External links

Adam Carr's Election Archive
Daily Yomiuri Online: Inequality at the polls must be corrected
MIC: Elections, political funds
Free Choice Foundation: Election system in Japan
NHKSenkyoWEB: monthly schedules of upcoming (national, prefectural and all municipal) elections (in Japanese)