61128 Takao Saito of Kensei Kai, who later in the Showa era rose to prominence with his speeches on anti-militarism, wrote the following in his journal on March 29, 1925, the day the so-called Universal Suffrage Law for Men was enacted.
61129 The new law all at once expanded the electorate from about a mere two percent of the total population up until that time to twenty percent, making it indeed a groundbreaking electoral system at the time.
61130 "On the day that marked a new era in the political arena in Japan, as expected the tense faces of the enthusiastic audience peered out row after row in the tightly crammed public gallery of both Houses...."
61131 In its morning edition for March 30 of that year, the Tokyo Nichi-Nichi Shimbun, the forerunner to the Mainichi Newspaper, reported the enactment of the new law.
61132 The system called "election" is considered by far the best and wisest system among the political systems conceived by humankind.
61133 The electoral system in Japan began in 1889 with the adoption of a mainly single-seat constituency system, and the Universal Suffrage Law for Men is the prototype of what is currently the system coming into place.
61134 The end of the Cold War presented a situation where any political party can come into power, and while Japanese politics has come out of its 38-year domination by the Liberal Democratic Party, at the same time, the new politics has lost sight of the "value" of the political objective to replace the dead-end politics of influence peddling, thus sending Japanese politics as a whole into an aimless state.
61135 Social conditions show a mixture of only two extreme attitudes toward politics: pent-up discontent and avoidance or disenchantment.
61136 The time has come for us to sit down and start to plan on how we will again capture the "value" aspired by politics as well as define specific objectives that have real relevance in the context of post Cold War world and the twenty-first century.
61137 It just so happens that this year is 1995, the "year of choice."
61138 For a start, we want to go over the political mechanism, which is completely overlooked yet it is naturally important.
61139 First of all, are not both politicians and voters assuming that Diet members are "agents" as opposed to "representatives" ?
61140 Are we not forgetting that Diet members represent the entire nation as opposed to being mandated by individual constituents or regions?
61141 Additionally, have we misplaced the mechanism where, unlike the bureaucratic institution, people can have direct control over politics?