Online Is Off Limits to Japan’s Politicians

Japanese politicians can dispatch loudspeaker trucks to peaceful neighborhoods, begging for votes at decibel levels that would ensure defeat in any Western country. They can use telephone banks without restrictions to harass voters at dinner time.

But what politicians in Japan may not do during an election campaign is the least invasive form of politicking yet invented: They may not post campaign literature on the Internet.

Japan’s strict electioneering rules are under scrutiny once again as the country prepares for an important parliamentary election Sunday, the first in nearly four years.

With 480 seats in the more powerful lower house of parliament up for grabs and the ruling Liberal Democratic Party’s gaffe-prone Prime Minister Yoshiro Mori’s popularity plummeting almost every time he speaks, the election is shaping up to be a fierce fight.

But Japanese political cyberspace has become an unusually sedate place. Some candidates and activists fearful of running afoul of the law closed their home pages when the official campaign period began Tuesday. Others, exploiting a legal loophole, simply left old material untouched, since home pages posted before the campaign begins are allowed to remain up provided they are not altered.

Technically, Internet campaigning is not illegal here. But under Japanese election law, anything that is not explicitly permitted is not allowed. And the Home Affairs Ministry, which oversees elections, has interpreted the election law to mean that cyberspace is out of bounds.

Opposition parties, who believe Japanese Netizens are their natural constituents, have tried to introduce legislation to lift this de facto ban, claiming that Japan is the only democracy where electronic campaigning is in effect prohibited. The conservative LDP has refused, citing concerns about hackers, untraceable cyber-slander and inequities in public access to the Internet.

Despite disagreements over the 12-day ban on e-campaigning, Japanese use of the Internet for political discussion is fast increasing, and nearly everyone agrees that’s a healthy trend for a democracy recently plagued by apathy and the much-criticized tradition of leaving important decisions to elite bureaucrats.

Though Japan has been slow to go online, in part because of steep access charges, the Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications estimates that 27 million Japanese were using the Internet at the end of last year, out of a population of 126 million. All of the major political parties and at least 177 members of parliament have their own home pages.

The LDP, which has long relied on its rural power base, has lagged in exploiting the new technology. According to the Asahi newspaper, only 36% of LDP politicians have home pages, compared with 61% of Democratic Party of Japan lawmakers and more than half of all members of the New Komeito and Liberal parties.

Fearful of losing the race to cyberspace, LDP headquarters sent a memo in March asking all lawmakers who had not yet established Web sites to do so.

Japan’s Communist Party, which is expected to do well in the coming elections as a haven for protest voters, is imposing party discipline even online. Its lawmakers are not permitted to open their own home pages, though they may post individual messages on the party’s Web site.

Political Chat Rooms Are Multiplying

Last month, the Asahi’s Web site sponsored Japan’s first political debate on the Internet. One lawmaker declared the level of debate superior to that in his parliamentary committee. Private chat rooms on politics are multiplying. Many lawmakers reportedly are so delighted to be able to bypass the Japanese media that they are rising earlier to answer e-mails pouring in from constituents.

So why not let voters log on during the campaign season to study what the candidates have to say?

Japanese election law is designed to limit the cost of campaigns and ensure a level playing field, but as a result, critics say, it is an arcane morass of regulations.

Mercifully, each candidate is allowed to use only one loudspeaker truck, and that only between 8 a.m. and 8 p.m. (Tokyo municipal regulations state that the noise must be kept to 85 decibels at a distance of 33 feet from the speaker, but cacophony is still the norm during campaign season.)

To further enforce fairness, the law specifies exactly how many leaflets each candidate may distribute (70,000), how many postcards may be mailed (35,000) and even the dimensions of campaign posters and where they may be hung.

Four years ago--the dawn of Japan’s Internet Age--the mandarins at the Home Affairs Ministry decided that since home pages usually contain photographs and text, candidates’ home pages are the equivalent of neon signs or billboards, which are not permissible campaign tools, explained Kazuo Ichikawa of the ministry’s election affairs section.

Sound, however, is not covered by the law. So there are no restrictions on telephone use, provided that a candidate’s phone bill doesn’t exceed campaign spending limits.

But changing technology is challenging the logic of the law. Home Affairs Minister Kosuke Hori recently told parliament that candidates are free to canvass for votes by dialing mobile phone numbers but may not send written messages to the 18.4 million Japanese whose mobile phones can display text messages or e-mail on their tiny screens. In theory, candidates could legally e-mail sound-only messages to an unlimited number of voters, though it is not clear whether anyone intends to do so.

Some younger, cyber-savvy members of parliament say the ministry’s interpretations are absurd.

To spoof what he calls a nonsensical law, lawmaker Satoshi Shima, 42, of the Democratic Party of Japan, has posted a blank Web site. When the user clicks on the white page, it plays a voice message from Shima explaining the restrictions on cyber-campaigning.

“In Japan, everything depends on the interpretations of the bureaucrats, and their interpretations are often very weird,” Shima said in a recent mobile phone interview while stumping through his district in Mie prefecture. “This is just a symbol.”

Efforts to Lift the Ban Went Nowhere

Liberal Party member Tetsuya Tasso, 36, says the Home Affairs Ministry’s definition of a home page as an image is technologically odd, since what is posted on a candidate’s Web page is digital data that can be turned into text or images by the user’s own browser.

But Ichikawa noted that the Home Affairs Ministry is responsible only for enforcing the law and that a bill to allow Internet campaigning failed in parliament two years ago. This spring, discussions between the LDP and its coalition partners about removing the restrictions again went nowhere.

If anything, Ichikawa said, the Japanese public supports more, not fewer, restrictions on the way elections are waged.

The Osaka-based Alliance to Defeat Unqualified Parliamentarians, one of at least five Japanese citizens groups circulating blacklists of candidates they deem unsuitable, had posted on its Web site a list of 13 politicians it claims are corrupt, criminal, promise-breakers or otherwise unfit to serve. But Yoneko Matsuura, an activist with the group, said the list has been removed.

The Home Affairs Ministry says the blacklists are not illegal, but political action groups are not allowed to engage in election campaigning, and the alliance decided not to push the point.

Tasso, a former diplomat turned politician, closed his Web site in 1996 to avoid running afoul of election law. Back then, his home page had received only 1,400 visitors. This April, after the sudden collapse of then-Prime Minister Keizo Obuchi and a surge of interest in politics, it got 27,000 hits. So Tasso is leaving it up during the campaign but said he will not update it.

Standardized Home Pages Proposed

For future elections, Tasso proposes having the election commission set up and maintain standardized home pages on which each candidate could post his or her platform.

“If you have a lot of money, you can set up a catchy Web site, put up games and graphics and get a great Web designer to make you a really cool page,” Tasso said.

By contrast, he said, giving each candidate a standard Web format to fill out would ensure fairness. And the beneficiaries could range from cash-strapped newcomers to elderly incumbents who might otherwise be lost in cyberspace.

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Makiko Inoue of The Times’ Tokyo Bureau contributed to this report.