During the spring of our third year in Japan, mysterious billboards began sprouting alongside the blossoms all over Tokyo. They featured ro...
During the spring of our third year in Japan, mysterious billboards began sprouting alongside the blossoms all over Tokyo. They featured rows of numbered square boxes, arranged sequentially from 1 to about 40. My boys and I walked past one on our way to the local supermarket. There was another billboard in front of the park, and still another near the dentist’s office.
We drove each other crazy hazarding guesses about what these were. A community lucky draw? A neighbourhood game of bingo? An effort to teach toddlers their numbers?
Then one morning, the numerals had been replaced by faces – mostly photographs of clean-cut men in near-identical dark suits and inoffensive ties. Occasionally, there was a picture of a woman, also impeccably tidy and wholesome. It transpired that this was Japanese democracy in operation. The photos were of the candidates for the 900-plus local assembly seats among Tokyo’s twenty-three wards.
If I’m honest, the guessing games about the numbers I’d played with my kids were more exciting than local politics in Japan, and I would have paid no more attention had it not been for a news item in the Japan Times.
