Education on Sovereign People

Multi-partisan coalition submitted on Thursday a bill for lowering the age of voting in national and local election to the Diet. Young people in the age of eighteen and nineteen will newly be able to vote in election of House of Councillors next year, if the bill passes. Leaders of Shinzo Abe administration look serious about educating young voters to teach what it means to be sovereign people. The reason is to achieve new votes amounting to 2.4 millions.

The bill had been considered along with the process of paving the way for amending the Constitution of Japan. There had not been a law determining actual process for general voting about the amendment until 2007. The General Voting Law for constitutional amendment decided that the vote should be done by the people with the age of eighteen or older. But, there appeared an argument that the difference of voting age between general voting for constitutional amendment and for ordinary elections must be eliminated. The result was to lower the voting age of elections to eighteen.

The biggest question then was contradiction with the age of adult, which was still twenty. Juveniles Act determines that justice for juveniles committed crime should be examined in family court. If a voter in the age of eighteen or nineteen committed illegal activity in election campaign, when election age was lowered, he or she would be treated as juvenile. It would be possible for campaign managers to hire more juveniles whose penalty would be lighter than adults for illegal activities. To compensate this gap, the new law assumes that serious crime of juveniles in the election will be examined as ordinary crime with prosecutors. The important point is whether legal violation in election campaign should be treated as atrocious crime like murder, burglar or arson.

To lead young voters to right direction, leaders of Abe administration are focusing on education on them. “It is important to edit side reader to help students obtain political neutrality determined in Fundamentals of Education Act and let them positively participate in election,” told Chief Cabinet Secretary, Yoshihide Suga. Nobody in the administration has, however, defined “political neutrality” in education on sovereign people. This term is rather used for restraining leftist education by teachers’ union.

Strangely enough, conservative lawmakers are reluctant to render voting right to juveniles, doubting independence of Japanese young people. Others always demand heavy penalty on juveniles, every time serious crime by them happens. No fundamental discussion of raising responsible young agers has been made so far. If they want to teach their children well, they need to establish a society with justice, without discriminative hate speech, unfair gap between rich and poor, or political maneuver unleashed from the Constitution.