No online campaigning in Japan
Peter Black’s Freedom to Differ:
Newsweek has a revealing report on how Japan has blocked online campaigning. It is remarkable to discover that such a technologically advanced nation places such extensive restrictions on online campaigning:
Japan is one of the world’s most wired countries; 60 percent of its
citizens have high-speed broadband and e-commerce is thriving. More
blogs are written in Japanese than any other language. Politicians do
use the Web for some things—listing schedules or recounting what they
had for lunch or, in Prime Minister Taro Aso’s case, turgid accounts of
the history of his constituency.
Try to use the Internet
in an actual campaign, however, and you run into serious obstacles. The
first hitch is Japan’s 58-year-old election law. (Originally intended
for printed matter, the law has been extended to cover virtual material
as well.) Once an official campaign has started, candidates are barred
from updating their home pages, launching or amending blogs—podcasts
are allowed because the law applies only to text or images—posting
political statements or sending text messages to mobile phones.
Additional regulations prohibit donors from using credit cards online
to support candidates, effectively preventing online fundraising.
…
As Kim Jung Hoon, a Keio University professor who is lobbying for
liberalization of the Japanese Web, puts it, Japan “is ruled by a very
stable and old political system.” Kim says that “politicians,
bureaucrats, the media and big business are all very tightly
interconnected. Basically they want to suppress and eliminate any
possibility for change. And the Internet is a major source of change.”
Japan’s
nonconfrontational culture probably also plays a role. Despite the
proliferation of blogs in the country, there is a notable lack of
political polemic online—in remarkable contrast to neighboring South
Korea, where the fates of heads can rise and fall on the whim of a
fiery Internet culture.…