More on local politics

This coming Sunday is the next set of local elections - for city council members and mayor.  There are some places (assuming they're rural) with uncontested candidates.  Just not enough people want to run.  You can read a short article about it at the Mainichi English news page.


My city doesn't have that problem!  We have 3 candidates for mayor and about 45 for city assembly.  Recently, I found out that the city assembly election is a bit different than I thought.  I assumed that the city was broken down into districts and different candidates run in each district.  Nope.  Although candidates may restrict their promotional activities in agreement with other members of their own political party, the election is city-wide.  This means I have to choose one candidate out of 45!  This seems a bit weird to me, since if one member of a certain party is super popular, he/she may draw votes away from another member of the same party and therefore end up with less power in the assembly.  But I guess it all works out somehow.


The top vote-getters are elected to the assembly.  For my city, the number of assembly members is 36, so 36 out of 45 people will be successful.  I think those are pretty decent odds.  Each city's number of assembly members depends on the city population, of course.


*******************************************************
Of course, I have certain issues which are important to me.  As a teacher and as a parent, I'm most interested in making sure kids are taken care of.  One HUGE issue for me is the privatization of public daycares/after school care.  No matter that the quality of care is proven to DROP and it actually makes the job harder for the caregivers...  I fought against the privatization of my daughter's after school care last year.  I fought so hard that when I went to the after school care office at city hall (for an unrelated problem), the guy in charge of the privatization effort looked a bit scared to see me!   


Among the mayoral candidates, only one is against privatization.   So you know who's got my vote! 
(PS - Isshin no kai is pro-privatization...big surprise there....)