Uh huh yeah sure
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Looking at that nazi picture turns my stomach. They’re all so young. This is not good.
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ETA
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Its awful, I attend marches etc against nazis and related slime in Germany but I can’t vote and I’m very time poor at the moment, I really don’t know what more I can do at the moment but I am open to ideas.
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I am really excited for this Sunday because it’s the first election for the lower house of the Japanese Diet since I obtained Japanese citizenship, so this will be my first time to have a voice in deciding Japan’s Prime Minister!
Japan has kind of a weird system for Diet elections. The Diet has both directly elected members and what are called “proportional seats.” The first one is pretty straightforward: you vote for a specific candidate who has been nominated by a party.
The second one is a bit more complicated. Each political party releases a list of people whom they want to appoint to the Diet, but you vote for the party instead of any of those individuals. The party then gets to appoint a certain number of members from that list proportional to the number of votes that they received.
I am planning to split my vote: casting my ballot for the Constitutional Democratic Party individual candidate and then voting for the Communist Party of Japan in the hope that they can pick up a seat or two.
Prime Minister Ishiba is already proving unpopular in opinion polls, and his campaign promise to almost double the minimum wage is being met with skepticism because it does not seem that he has broud support for it within his own party. Anything could happen on Sunday!
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“Diet” is an interesting translation. I know that a lot of Meji-era Japanese institutions are based on Prussian examples. Is that the case here as well? I don’t think diet is used outside the germanophone area for political structures otherwise.
Yeah. That’s straight up the German election system.
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Yes! In fact, Japan was closed off from the world from the early 17th century until the middle of the 19th century due to a policy of isolation. In the 1870s, a newly open Japan sent envoys to Europe and North America to learn the ways of the West, and these expeditions led to the introduction of all kinds of new systems that were practically carbon copies of what the envoys had observed.
ETA for Details
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Yes.
The word diet derives from Latin and was a common name for an assembly in medieval European polities like the Holy Roman Empire. The Meiji Constitution was largely based on the form of constitutional monarchy found in nineteenth century Prussia that placed the king not as a servant of the state but rather the sole holder of power and sovereignty over his kingdom, which the Japanese view of their emperor and his role at the time favoured.[26] The new Diet was modeled partly on the German Reichstag and partly on the British Westminster system. Unlike the post-war constitution, the Meiji constitution granted a real political role to the Emperor, although in practice the Emperor’s powers were largely directed by a group of oligarchs called the genrō or elder statesmen.[27]
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If memory serves, there were trading stations with mainly Portuguese traders until the 17C, at which point there was a political thing about foreign contamination of Japanese culture, at which point the Europeans were kicked out.
Then the American Admiral Perry sailed into Tokyo harbour in 1853 and declared that Japan was open to trading with the US now, no Japan does not get a choice in the matter.
Once the Americans forced the Japanese to contact the world, they decided they’d better go and study the thing they were going to have to deal with.
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