The Tokyo Gubernatorial race was held on 9 February. There were four major candidates, or rather there were four candidates who were labelled as major by the media. Masuzoe, who got elected with 2 million votes, was an LDP candidate. Utsunomiya, a former President of Japan Bar Association, who as a lawyer pioneered in the field of defending poor debtors, was supported by the Communists and Social Democrats. Hosokawa, a former Prime Minister, backed by Koizumi, also a former PM with some charisma, fought almost on the single issue of no more nuclear plants. These two got one million each. The fourth man was Tamogami, a former Chief of Staff of the Air Force of Japan's Self-Defence Forces. To everyone's surprise he got 600,000. They were all men in the mid-60s, except Hosokawa who was in the mid-70s. The media depicted Masuzoe and Hosokawa as the two main contenders. So did even the BBC. But Hosokawa got slightly less than Utsunomiya.
What kind of man is Tamogami? Who supported him? Are there likely to be men like him in the future contests? He is not a man of charisma. His style of speech is very ordinary. But he may be called rightist, even with an adjective of ultra, in that he had been fired when he was the Chief of Staff when he published an article to deny that Japan's wars were wars of aggression, and this time also he repeated the same theme, denying aggression, massacre of Naning, comfort women and so on. Those voices have been dormant all the time, but the arrival of Prime Minister Abe has made the political atmosphere easier for such voices to be broadcast, and heard. At the same time the ultra voices have played the role of making Abe and the present mainstream LDP less of the rightist and more of the middle-of-the-road. There will be a concerted effort to that end, although it is not very likely to succeed.
The exit-poll shows that a quarter of the voters in their 20s voted for him. In other wwords the voters in the higher echelons turned away from him, a man who might work to make this a more war-like country. Having been born in 1948, Tamogami does not know the war, unlike the higher generation. The greater problem, therefore, is how to win the younger ones to the cause of peace, in other words to the cause of welfare, and higher quality of life.
What kind of man is Tamogami? Who supported him? Are there likely to be men like him in the future contests? He is not a man of charisma. His style of speech is very ordinary. But he may be called rightist, even with an adjective of ultra, in that he had been fired when he was the Chief of Staff when he published an article to deny that Japan's wars were wars of aggression, and this time also he repeated the same theme, denying aggression, massacre of Naning, comfort women and so on. Those voices have been dormant all the time, but the arrival of Prime Minister Abe has made the political atmosphere easier for such voices to be broadcast, and heard. At the same time the ultra voices have played the role of making Abe and the present mainstream LDP less of the rightist and more of the middle-of-the-road. There will be a concerted effort to that end, although it is not very likely to succeed.
The exit-poll shows that a quarter of the voters in their 20s voted for him. In other wwords the voters in the higher echelons turned away from him, a man who might work to make this a more war-like country. Having been born in 1948, Tamogami does not know the war, unlike the higher generation. The greater problem, therefore, is how to win the younger ones to the cause of peace, in other words to the cause of welfare, and higher quality of life.
