Oct 29, 2021 (nytimes.com) - The disproportionate weight of rural voters in Japan gives sparsely populated parts of the country more representation — and more government largess — than urban areas, perpetuating what critics call an unfair system.
The mountain village of Chizu explains a lot about how one party has kept a virtual lock on power in Japan for close to seven decades.
The village, in western Japan, has long been in decline. Its population has dwindled to 6,600 people, close to half of them elderly. The obstetrics ward at the hospital closed more than 15 years ago. The once-dominant forestry industry has shriveled, and a year-end fair is no longer held.
Yet last year, backed by a large dollop of central government funding, the village built a 12,000-square-foot library with a sizable children’s section. It erected a new nursery school in 2017, and the middle school underwent a complete renovation two years earlier.
As voters prepare to select members of Parliament in a national election on Sunday, the residents of Chizu are acutely cognizant of the forces behind this largess. In Japan, rural votes count for more than urban ones, giving less-populated areas like Chizu a disproportionately large number of seats in Parliament, and more chances to register their concerns with national politicians.
This structure plays to the advantage of the conservative Liberal Democratic Party, which has governed Japan for all but four years since 1955. The party is expected to eke out a majority in the parliamentary election, partly on the strength of support from the rural areas showered with taxpayer money.
In some ways, the power of Japan’s rural population parallels the political landscape in the United States, where each state has two senators regardless of population size — giving the Republican Party an outsized advantage because of its dominance of rural states.
In Chizu, the nexus between political representation and access to public coffers is unmistakable. Because its residents are represented by a heavyweight member of the L.D.P. in Parliament, “we can get sufficient government aid,” said Chizu’s mayor, Hideo Kaneko, 68, in an interview in his renovated office.
Chizu is in Tottori, Japan’s least populated prefecture. In the district that includes Chizu, the member of Parliament represents fewer than half the number of voters served by the lower house lawmaker in Tokyo’s most densely populated district.
