Election Season in Japan
Spend much time in Japan and you’re bound to see trucks driving around town with loud speakers hooked up across the top. These are not ice cream vans, but political message carriers getting the word out quite locally. As Japan’s election loomed in mid-July, the number of vans and politicians out in public naturally increased. When I happened to see one out in Kobe, I had to take a closer look.
I won’t say the name of this individual, or his political affiliation because that’s not the point of this story. The man with the red sash was actually the candidate running for local office in Kobe (part of Hyogo prefecture) and the man beside him with the microphone was one of his constituents already in office. By the time I happened on the scene, the candidate himself didn’t say a single word. He just stood there, waving and being present, while the other guy gave a long speech about the issues.
The whole thing was very grassroots, and the crowd who had stopped on the street could not have been more than about 50 people outside of a shopping mall. As for the politics themselves, I was told by a friend that actually the narratives in Japan are not so different from the United States or other countries globally - lower taxes, immigration reform, the usual stuff. Somehow I imagined they might be campaigning to lower the price of Kobe beef (or at least eggs) but that didn’t seem to be the case.
The van was there for at least an hour, and at the end the candidate came down to take some photos with the crowd and shake hands. Most of the time these vans are only driven by the team running the campaign on behalf of the candidate, blasting the message over the loud speaker, so it was a nice chance to actually see one in person. They’re just people, like the rest of us, figuring out their own take on how a government should operate.
Shot on July 19, 2025 - Politics, Japan
Photos taken with the Nikon Z9 and Z 24-70mm f/2.8 S lens