Election poster boards for Japan's House of Representatives, left, and the Nara Prefectural Assembly are seen at a park in the city of Nara's Hikidacho neighborhood on Oct. 23, 2021. The candidate posters for the lower house election have been stuck on the prefectural assembly board, and vice versa. (Mainichi/Mizuki Hayashi)

       NARA -- Part of this Japanese city has a poster problem.

       During election campaigns in Japan, official boards are erected in public spaces for candidates to put up their posters. If there is more than one election happening on the same day -- as is the case in Nara Prefecture, where voters will cast ballots for both the national House of Representatives and the prefectural assembly on Oct. 31 -- then each election gets its own board.

       Neat, sensible.

       Except that in part of Nara, Japan's ancient capital, candidate posters have been put up on the poster board for the wrong election. In fact, all the posters in the city's Hikidacho neighborhood have ended up on the opposite board. How did this happen?

       On Oct. 23, a Mainichi Shimbun reader told this reporter about the switched-up posters on the two boards in a neighborhood park. Upon investigation, though the board for the prefectural assembly election clearly declares it as such, it was indeed hung instead with the likenesses of the three local lower house election candidates. Looking left, and there were the prefectural assembly candidates smiling out from the poster board for the lower house election.

       According to the company that put up the boards, they were asked by the city of Nara's election administration committee to put the ones for the prefectural assembly poll on the left, and the lower house election ones on the right. "If the posters were reversed, we might have made a mistake," a company representative said. However, two city officials went along for the work as well, and apparently checked that the boards had been put up correctly.

       A surprised municipal government official in charge of the project said, "There are sometimes cases of putting up posters in the wrong place, but I've never heard of all of them being reversed." The official said that the labels on the boards could be rewritten or covered with a sticker to correct them, "but it would be faster if the posters were just switched to the correct board, so I'd like to leave that to the campaign management of each candidate."

       However, one campaign manager for a prefectural assembly candidate told the Mainichi, "The lower house campaign began first, so I bet it was staff from those candidates' camps that made the mistake and took everyone else along with them." Removing election posters without permission could violate the Public Offices Election Act. The manager said with unease, "We can't switch the posters unless the lower house ones are removed."

       The city's election administrator commented, "We'd like to encourage our staff to be thorough in checking that the boards have been erected correctly, and campaign staff to use more caution to make sure the same thing does not happen again.

       (Japanese original by Mizuki Hayashi, Nara Bureau)

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