The Unprincipled Expediency of the Revision

The rough and heavy-handed revision of the Public Offices Election Law has set the stage for serious problems in the future. One problem is that it provides no principled basis for dealing with future changes in the relative sizes of prefectural populations.

This time the regional districts targeted for district mergers because of their low populations happened to be neighboring pairs of prefectures—Shimane-Tottori and Kōchi-Tokushima—so it was possible to create new districts simply by sticking them together. But what if the districts targeted because of low populations were, say, Saga Prefecture (on Kyūshū in the west) and Yamanashi Prefecture (in central Honshū)? Surely it would be impossible to combine such a pair into a single electoral district. So what will be done? Will it be a matter of waiting patiently until one of their neighbors also falls into the merger-target category? Or will their district be merged with that of a neighboring prefecture regardless of the latter’s size?

Most prefectures have multiple neighbors, but the revision does not provide any sort of rules for determining which neighbor a low-population district would be merged with for upper house electoral purposes. In Saga’s case, for example, would its district be merged with Nagasaki’s to the west or Fukuoka’s to the east? There is no telling what would be done in such cases. I guess the idea is to let matters ride for now and come up with additional ad hoc decisions when it becomes necessary to do so.

Even this time, surely it would have been possible to consider options other than simply sticking the two pairs of neighboring prefectures together. For example, the Shimane district might have been combined with Hiroshima and the Tottori district with Okayama, their respective neighbors to the south. Such mergers could have served just as well to reduce the disparity in vote values. The Diet ought to have listened to local residents’ opinions about such alternatives before reaching its decision.

Just for reference I would like to share a bit of local history from Tottori, where I formerly served as governor. This prefecture was incorporated into Shimane Prefecture for a period of five years starting in 1876. But the combined prefecture was long and narrow, stretching far from east to west, and travel was inconvenient. A strong independence movement arose in the eastern part of what had been Tottori Prefecture, and this led to the reestablishment of the prefecture on September 12, 1881. September 12 is now Tottori’s “prefectural citizens’ day” with observances of various sorts around the prefecture. I wonder how many Diet members know about this delicate historical background.