The Evening Star (April 10, 1946)
Women lead 25,000,000 Japs to polls for election of Diet
TOKYO (AP) – Twenty-five million Japanese – led by a surprisingly large number of women who lined up early at polling places – today elected a postwar government in their first free election in generations. Four hundred sixty-eight Diet seats are at stake.
The Tokyo vote was between 65 and 70 percent of those eligible – slightly higher than the confused and semi-restricted 1937 election, but considerably less than the 86 percent under Hideki Tojo’s coercion that marked the 1942 voting. A slightly higher trend was perceptible in several nearby rural communities.
Limited communications and slowness of election procedure prevented accurate reports from such key cities as Osaka, where balloting started slowly, with only 10 percent cast by 9 a.m. Polls opened at 7 a.m. and closed at 6 p.m. This was a national holiday, to encourage balloting.
Early queues at Tokyo’s polling places led some Japanese observers to alter their previous predictions of a 75 percent turnout, but the lines slackened in the afternoon.
However, the number of women voters exceeded expectations. In Tokyo more than 50 percent of those eligible went to the polls, whereas prognosticators – both male and female – had expected little more than 25 percent of them to turn out.
Many who asked for ballots were unable to vote because of mixed records and poorly coordinated registration, partially due to recent population shifts.
This led some Communist leaders immediately to demand, through the Japanese press, that a new election be held.
The Tojo election of 1942, limited to voting by heads of families, brought an 83 percent national turnout, topped by 86 percent in Tokyo where coercion was strongest. Tokyo’s 1937 vote was 63 percent.
An incomplete, midafternoon count showed Tokyo’s heaviest vote came from predominately working class and silk-stocking wards. Heavily bombed Shibuya, where thousands still live in metal shacks, voted 70 percent.
In nearby Hachioji, a farming community, 83 percent of more than 33,000 eligible voters cast ballots. Seventy-seven percent voted in Tachikawa, also on the edge of Tokyo.
Many take babies to polls
Women voters outnumbered the men in surprisingly heavy, early morning turnouts in five rural communities near Tokyo and appeared at Tokyo’s major booths in increasing numbers.
Many entered polling places with babies strapped to their backs. Others left children in impromptu nurseries. In one big Tokyo labor ward, Shinagawa, a temporary nursery was overflowing with babies by 9 a.m., two hours after the polls opened.
By 10 o’clock, 40 percent of all eligible voters in rural Utsunomiya community had cast ballots – with women predominating. Women also were in the majority among early voters in Ashikaga, Tachikawa, Kawagoya and Miyabachi, outside the capital. They outnumbered men four to one in Ashikaga during the first three hours.
County reports due tomorrow
There was no indication of trend. First reports of the count are expected late tomorrow.
Political experts earlier had forecast victory for Conservatives, but with no single party winning a majority of the Diet.
White-helmeted American military police and British troopers patrolled steadily, ready to act at any indication of coercion or intimidation of voters by employers, landlords or police. Among observers was W. McMahon Ball, British Commonwealth representative on the Allied council for Japan.
Brig. Gen. Courtney Whitney of the Allied headquarters military government section commented favorably on the orderliness of the Japanese.
Reds say voting is held with ‘unjustified speed’
MOSCOW (AP) – The Soviet government newspaper Izvestia, in a dispatch from Tokyo, declared today that the Japanese elections were being held with “unjustified speed” and that the average Japanese was but little interested.
The dispatch said Communist candidates had little chance because the rightist candidates have “unlimited spending money” and the “so-called neutral candidates” represent the powerful, reactionary upper classes.