As most people will know, Koizumi-san won his election on Sunday, but not by as much as many suspected. For an overview of what the election consisted of, take a look at this BBC article. The results are here.
This left Koizumi-san’s LDP to make deals with several other parties, including New Komeito who may (or may not) be backed by the Soka Gakkai group, a Buddhist group/sect/cult/whatever. Japanese political parties are more like groups of factions in themselves, who reform every now and then to present a new face (hence all the ‘New…’ names in the English party names).
For once, I actually sat through as much of the TV coverage as I could (pausing just for a delicious spot of dinner – grilled fish). Most of the channels looked the same – lots of celebrities chatting, and one could be forgiven into thinking you were watching any one of the generic ‘variety’ shows (generic variety…).
However, there was a little bit of debate, and some cool computer graphics of Koizumi-san’s little samurai fighting opposition samurai for control of a board. One interesting trait for me (and any other Brits raised on Jon Snow’s swinging pendulum on Newsnight) was that the numbers along the bottom of the screen were based on exit polls, and not actually declared ballots – at first I couldn’t understand why some of the numbers were going down! Anyway, let’s see what Koizumi-san can do now.