Elections in Fukushima: Difficult

November 12, 2015

Candidates, voters lament difficulties of mayor election for evacuated Fukushima town

http://mainichi.jp/english/english/newsselect/news/20151112p2a00m0na017000c.html

Candidates and voters are both decrying the lack of information getting to out-of-prefecture evacuees about a mayoral election for the town of Namie, Fukushima Prefecture, which has been evacuated due to the Fukushima No. 1 Nuclear Power Plant disaster.

Three candidates are competing for the position, with the vote to be held on Nov. 15. However, candidates are in many cases unable to learn the addresses of around one-quarter of the town's voters who have evacuated out of the prefecture, making it more difficult to get their messages to them.

On Nov. 9, one candidate could be seen in front of Shibuya Station in Tokyo, microphone in hand as he announced, "I have come here to get my message out to as many of the nation's evacuees as I can." Around 20 residents of Namie who have evacuated to the Tokyo metropolitan area gathered for the speech, but the rest of the crowd mostly passed by, although a few did stop and direct their phone cameras at the sight.

The candidate says, "If passersby will post on Twitter, then my message will get out to more people." According to the town's election administration commission, the Public Offices Election Act does not forbid making outdoor speeches outside of the area holding an election.

There is still no estimate of when radioactive decontamination in around 80 percent of Namie will be removed. Of the around 16,000 eligible voters in the town's population, about 4,000 now live outside of Fukushima Prefecture, spreading across 44 different prefectures. This mayor election is the second since the disaster, but the first was settled without a vote. For this election, reconstruction policy for the town is among the central issues.

The election commission has extended the length of the campaign period to 10 days instead of the usual five days, and it is mailing out fliers with the candidates' positions on them to voters. However, the candidates' election teams are dissatisfied with these fliers, saying there was not enough space to lay out their platforms. One candidate, expecting the mail to be forwarded to voters' current address, sent out 6,000 documents related to a political organization of his, but around half of these were returned due to the inability to deliver them. While the town government knows the evacuation addresses of the population, it is not giving that information to the candidates' campaign staff, saying that would be a breach of privacy.

A senior member of one candidate's campaign staff says, "We cannot even hand out fliers to the voters. Can this really be called a democratic election?"

There is also dissatisfaction among voters. Kiyomi Kanazawa, 43, who has evacuated to Tokyo with her husband, says, "If I don't research on the Internet, it is hard to even know what is going on in the town. Even if I try to hear what the candidates' thoughts are on residents' return, I cannot hear what they have to say directly. I feel that we have less to work with in making our decision than people who evacuated to locations within Fukushima Prefecture."

Professor of political awareness Masao Matsumoto of Saitama University, who is knowledgeable about election systems, says, "I think they should have about a month-long election period. They also need to come up with their own ways to inform voters, such as putting videos from candidates on the town website."