Friday, July 13, 2007

Not Too Little, Not Too Much, Just the Right Amount of Wikipedia Attention the Formula for Success in Upper House Election?

For your convenience, I've done a Wikipedia survey of the twenty-five candidates running for the five Upper House seats in Tokyo.

The lack of a link means that there is no entry.

The description "public figure" means that the candidate is well-known independent of his/her political ambitions. The relevant Wikipedia entry reflects this.


Doctor Nakamatsu (Unaffiliated) Public figure. Bonus points for English language entry
Tetsuo Sawada (Unaffiliated) Bare-bones entry.
Tomoko Tamura (Japan Communist Party)
Hitomi Sugiura (Social Democrat Party) Public figure.
Toshiaki Kanda (Unaffiliated) Has Kanda News Network entry.
Sanzo Hosaka (LDP; incumbent) Bare-bones entry.
Yuko Tojo none. (Unaffiliated) But she has an English-language entry. This says more about Wikipedia than about Yasukuni.
Kisho Kurokawa (Symbiosis New Party) Public figure. Has English-language entry. A long one.
Hidenori Wago (New Party Freeway Club) Refuses to pay highway tolls.
Keiichiro Nakamura (Kokumin Shinto) Bare-bones entry.
Ryuhei Kawada (Unaffiliated) He has a life. Testament to real (in contrast to alternative) medicine. Close to Yasuo Tanaka, head of now-splintered Shinto Nihon.
Kikuo Suda none. (Organization for Halving the Number of Diet Members)
Kan Suzuki (DPJ; incumbent) Bare-bones entry.
Mitsuo Matayoshi (The World Economic Community Party) He is The One God. Also has English-language entry. What did you expect - he's God.
Nobuyuki Suzuki (The New Wind Capitol) Bare-bones entry. Blogs, apparently..
Natsuo Yamaguchi (Komeito; incumbent) Bare-bones entry.
Masako Ohkawara (DPJ) Bare-bones entry.
Mack Akasaka (Japan Smile Party) Does this convince you that he can solve every social problem from bullying to the suicide epidemic? I didn't think so.
Tamayo Marukawa (LDP) Public figure.
Testuo Arai (Unaffiliated)

As you can see, most of the candidates have Wikipedia entries. Going over them one by one, I see a pattern emerging. Clearly, if you don't have a Wikipedia entry, you lose. What is less obvious but just as true is that the one that have English-language entries also have no chance of winning. Is the latter fact related to the inflated reputations some Japanese politicians get in the English-language media? Should I stop blogging in English? Questions, questions.

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