2005 Japanese general election
General elections were held in Japan on 11 September 2005 for all 480 seats of the House of Representatives, the lower house of the Diet. Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi called the election almost two years before the end of the term taken from the previous elections in 2003, after bills to privatize Japan Post were voted down in the upper house, despite strong opposition from within his own Liberal Democratic Party (LDP).
DPJ candidate Akihisa Nagashima (who failed to win his district in Tachikawa, Tokyo) in his campaign bus.
House of Representatives (Japan)
The House of Representatives is the lower house of the National Diet of Japan. The House of Councillors is the upper house.
The composition of the House is established by Article 41 and Article 42 of the Constitution of Japan. The House of Representatives has 465 members, elected for a four-year term. Of these, 176 members are elected from 11 multi-member constituencies by a party-list system of proportional representation, and 289 are elected from single-member constituencies.
House of Representatives (Japan)
Kuroda Kiyotaka, Satsuma samurai and prime minister in the late 1880s, coined the term "transcendentalism" (超然主義, chōzen shugi) on the occasion of the promulgation of the Meiji Constitution in 1889. The oligarchs should try to "transcend" electoral politics and govern without partisan majorities the House of Representatives.
Itō Hirobumi, a Chōshū samurai, member of the House of Peers and prime minister of Japan on three non-consecutive occasions between 1885 and 1901. He was a main architect of the Imperial Constitution which created the Imperial Diet. When the oligarchs attempts to govern "transcendentally" mostly failed in the 1890s, he saw the necessity for permanent allies among elected political parties.
Hara Takashi, although actually himself born a Morioka noble, made his career as commoner-politician and became the first and one of only three prime ministers from the House of Representatives in the Empire.