Election Rigging in Japan

TOKYO -- On a cloudy afternoon during election week in February on the front steps of a town hall in the Tokyo district (which includes Tokyo proper and other cities) arrived buses full of employees from a large company. Upon exiting the bus, they walked straight into the town hall in a city home to many factories and offices of large Japanese multinational corporations, many of them household names.

The group of corporate employees that had arrived were not registering to vote, nor were they there to hear campaign speeches. Five days before the election, they were casting their ballots for city council for a company candidate, an employee whose campaign was funded by the company to represent the corporate interests in the local government.

The employees had received special permission from the town government to submit an absentee ballot, granting the company the ability to organize a bus campaign to artificially increase the voter turnout by shuttling voters to the town hall.

Every large corporation in the city directly funded candidates in the local elections, backing four of the 40 candidates for 30 seats. All of the company candidates won office, with virtually the entire corporate group among the top five.

The corporations did more to assure their victory than simply bus voters to the town hall. Many of the voters were coerced by their employers to vote for company candidates.

"Voters at the company were forced by the management to vote for the company candidate," says one local employee, "and those that resisted were harassed to vote along corporate party lines."

Workers report that company managers intimidate recalcitrant employees to vote for the corporate candidates, and severely punish those who refuse to follow company dictates.

This kind of corporate election-rigging has had a major impact on local elections and government policy. Corporate members on the city council form a corporate group to promote and protect the rights of corporations. Since they are not affiliated with any party, they run as independents and claim their position is to represent the company at city hall. One corporate campaigner ran on the platform of lowering corporate taxes and expanding the parking space available for employees.

As in many countries, local governments in Japan depend on corporate property taxes to pay for hospitals, health care for the elderly and handicapped, education, housing for the poor and other social services. The local tax base is becoming increasingly important, as the national government has been cutting back funding for local districts amidst the recent financial crunch.

Local political activists are outraged with the corporate undermining of their democracy.

"Forcing the city to buy company products is one reason why they rig elections," says a member of a Tokyo district city council. "Those contracts are supposed to be open for anyone to bid, but through favors they are able to force the city to buy their products."

A professor of law and social activist in Tokyo says, "the corporate city council members work to promote their self interest by working to reduce property tax and relax environmental regulations. The long term impact is to undermine our democracy."

In one city council assembly, the corporate group has sided with conservatives who favor closing a progressive community center.

"Corporate councilmen in the assembly are there simply to gain favors from the city," says a professor who helped found the center.

"They represent a very large political force and are working to undermine progressive movements that work to improve the welfare of citizens. Now they want to close down a community center that I founded 20 years ago which provides education for children and the elderly. In return, they receive favors to pollute our environment and to construct one more building the city does not need."

But most citizens are unaware of how the big corporations rig elections, and are generally disconnected from politics. Corporate council members support policies to keep the public apathetic.

Among these policies: strict limits on government support for distribution of campaign literature (adopted in the early 1970s "in reaction to fears of effective campaign organization of the Communist Party," says the law professor); bans on door-to-door canvassing by candidates; rules reducing the amount of written information that each candidate can distribute; and an extremely liberal absentee voter policy.

"Every year they pass laws to restrict our political freedoms," the law professor says. "Information is limited to announcements on vans that drive around town noisily broadcasting the candidates' positions, narrowing information to little but annoying sound bites." Corporate candidates are known among the citizens as little more than independents who have "kind hearts" and an interest in "building a new city."

The base for opposition to the corporate candidates is weak, thanks to a conservative labor movement.

More than a decade ago, Sohyo was an important progressive union federation. With the support of the Socialist Party, it organized public sector employees and helped drive up wages and benefits for workers throughout Japan. With the privatization of large corporations like NTT and Japan Railway in 1987, the progressive Sohyo federation was broken and forced to merge with the Domei, the conservative private sector federation.

Together, the two groupings formed a new national federation called Rengo -- which now supports corporate candidates. In one recent newsletter Rengo boasted that more than 46 corporate candidates in one district would seek office in the April election this year.

-- Jon Leland

Jon Leland is a pseudonym for a U.S. employee of the large corporation first mentioned in this story.