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Japan Electoral Districts
The apportionment of electoral districts still reflects
the
distribution of the population in the years following
World War II,
when only one-third of the people lived in urban areas and
twothirds lived in rural areas. In the next forty-five years,
the
population became more than three-quarters urban, as
people
deserted rural communities to seek economic opportunities
in Tokyo
and other large cities
(see Migration
, ch. 2). The lack of
reapportionment led to a serious underrepresentation of
urban
voters. Urban districts in the House of Representatives
were
increased by five in 1964, bringing nineteen new
representatives to
the lower house; in 1975 six more urban districts were
established,
with a total of twenty new representatives allocated to
them and to
other urban districts. Yet great inequities remained
between urban
and rural voters.
In the early 1980s, as many as five times the votes
were needed
to elect a representative from an urban district compared
with
those needed for a rural district. Similar disparities
existed in
the prefectural constituencies of the House of
Councillors. The
Supreme Court had ruled on several occasions that the
imbalance
violated the constitutional principle of one person-one
vote. The
Supreme Court mandated the addition of eight
representatives to
urban districts and the removal of seven from rural
districts in
1986. Several lower house districts' boundaries were
redrawn. Yet
the disparity is still as much as three urban votes to one
rural
vote.
After the 1986 change, the average number of persons
per lower
house representative was 236,424. However, the figure
varied from
427,761 persons per representative in the fourth district
of
Kanagawa Prefecture, which contains the large city of
Yokohama, to
142,932 persons in the third district of largely rural and
mountainous Nagano Prefecture. A major reapportionment
seemed
unlikely in the near future because rural voters remained
a major
source of support for the LDP
(see Interest Groups
, this
ch.).
Data as of January 1994
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