This essay examines the spread of “independent” disguises in local elections and criticizes Asahi Shimbun for describing a politically affiliated group as “formed by citizens,” contrasting it with Sankei’s wording to expose a pattern of impression management.

2016-05-28

◎Preface: From Masayuki Takayama’s Latest Paperback

The following is from the latest paperback work by Masayuki Takayama, introduced yesterday.
That he is the one and only journalist in the postwar world is proven by almost every chapter.

◎Fake Newspapers in an Age of Fakes

Fake Newspapers in an Age of Fakes
When I went to vote in some national election, a ballot for a ward mayoral election was included as well.
I have a sense of being a Tokyo resident, but I have no sense of being a ward resident.
If I had to name something, it would be that depending on the ward where one lives, one’s car license plate is made to say “Nerima” or “Adachi.”
On the day you get stuck with “Adachi,” the cars around you avoid you and it becomes easier to drive, but for some reason even the nicest car looks cheap.
With that level of awareness, I don’t know who the ward mayor is.
Above that there is the Tokyo governor, and there is also the idle Tokyo metropolitan assembly.
While thinking that we should scrap these costly elections and go back to appointing ward mayors the way it used to be, I looked at the list of candidates and was astonished: the party affiliation column, which I had hoped would provide at least some basis for judgment, showed that every single one of them was unaffiliated.
That cannot be the case.
From experience I know that in such trivial elections, Communist Party members always slip in.
Even if you simply roll a pencil and choose, there is a fairly high probability you will end up pleasing the Communist Party.
After voting, I asked my wife and daughter how they distinguished among the “all unaffiliated” candidates, and they said they left it to fate.
When they asked me what I did, I said that considering the possibility of an unpleasant outcome with a fairly high probability, I abstained—and they admired me, saying, “So that was an option.”
In the recent Chiba gubernatorial election, that “unaffiliated” label became an issue.
The winner, Kensaku Morita, ran as an independent.
But in reality, he remained a member of the Liberal Democratic Party.
Asahi Shimbun reported that, because this was “false advertising,” “a group ‘formed by citizens,’ the ‘Association to Accuse Mr. Kensaku Morita,’ filed a criminal complaint against Governor Morita.”
Yet it is unclear to me why it is acceptable when a Communist Party candidate in the Setagaya ward mayoral election pretends to be unaffiliated, while it is wrong when Morita Kensaku, aligned with the LDP, does so.
What caught my attention, however, was this “group formed by citizens”: Sankei Shimbun described it as “a group formed by Social Democratic Party–affiliated Chiba prefectural assembly members.”
In other words, it is a politically colored organization.
The motive for the complaint can also be explained by this political coloration, but why did Asahi describe it as “formed by citizens,” in such an “independent-like” manner?
Would it be inconvenient to write that it is SDP-affiliated?

◎To Be Continued