Voting For Japan's Lower House Election Starts

Japanese voters began casting their ballots for the House of Representatives general election Sunday morning to determine whether Prime Minister Yoshiro Mori's three-way ruling coalition will continue its grip on power.

Balloting started at 7 a.m. (local time) at most polling stations across Japan and will continue until 8 p.m., two hours longer than in the last lower house election in 1996.

A total of 1,404 candidates are vying for 480 seats, 300 in single-seat constituencies and the remaining 180 in the proportional-representation section. The number of lower house seats up for grabs were cut by 20 from 500 as a result of electoral reforms.

Eligible voters will be 107 million, a record high.

One focal point of the election is whether the ruling coalition,comprising the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), New Komeito and New Conservative Party, can win 254 seats to secure a stable majority in the lower house.

Attention is also focused on how many seats the LDP alone can gain. LDP Secretary General Hiromu Nonaka has set the goal at 229 seats.

The targets are well below the number of seats the tripartite coalition controlled prior to the dissolution of the lower chamber on June 2. At that time, the coalition held 336 seats, 271 of which were held by the LDP.

If votes fall short of the two targets, Mori could be forced to step down, analysts here said.

Recent opinion polls conducted by Japan's leading newspapers, however, showed that the coalition was on its way to securing a stable majority, although a high percentage of undecided voters, between 30 percent and 50 percent, made the results difficult to predict.

In the election campaign, the ruling coalition said it will continue to make economic efforts aimed at putting Japan's economy, which posted plus growth in fiscal 1999 after two years of

contraction, firmly on a path toward sustainable growth.

The opposition, however, criticized the ruling bloc for trying to spend its way out of the recession, and called for structural reforms.

The opposition bloc also blamed a series of controversial remarks made by Mori, including one in which he said Japan is "a divine nation with the emperor at its center." Critics said the

remark echoed the ideology that drove Japan's wartime militarism.

The LDP registered 337 candidates for the race, while the New Komeito fielded 74, and the New Conservative Party 19.

The main opposition Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) fielded 262,while the Japanese Communist Party (JCP) entered 332, among others. The results for most of the seats are expected to be known early Monday.

People's Daily Online --- http://www.peopledaily.com.cn/english/