Mena Hakamada, an 18-year-old college freshman, knows how important it is to vote. “To reflect our opinions, the only way is to vote,” said Ms. Hakamada, a physical education major at the University of Tsukuba. But Ms. Hakamada will not cast a ballot on Sunday, in the first national election in which Japanese 18- and 19-year-olds are allowed to vote. “I am busy tomorrow,” she said with a shake of her head. Ms. Hakamada is going on a field trip to the ocean, and she never got around to voting by absentee ballot in her hometown, Shizuoka, near Mount Fuji. When Japan goes to the polls to elect members to its upper house of Parliament on Sunday, the nation’s newly enfranchised teenagers are expected to make a lackluster showing.
Despite various efforts to lure young voters to the polls, fewer than 20 percent of 18- and 19-year-old citizens in a survey last week by the left-leaning newspaper Asahi Shimbun said they had a strong interest in the election, compared with 30 percent of the overall population.
The newly eligible voters already make up a slim slice of the voting bloc. With more than a quarter of the population now older than 65, these teenagers are just 2 percent of all voters. In a country where the demands of the aging population threaten to encumber its descendants, analysts have warned that politics is too dominated by seniors.
“Without young people’s participation,” said Kazuhisa Kawakami, a professor of political science at the International University of Health and Welfare in Narita, “the so-called silver democracy will carry on alone.”
Full Article: Teenagers in Japan Can Finally Vote. But Will They? – The New York Times.