HIGH school students casting votes in a straw poll for the Okinawa gubernatorial election in Japan on Nov 2, 2010.—AFP

TOKYO: Japan is set to take a baby step towards rebalancing the age scales when lawmakers lower the voting age to 18 from its current 20, allowing teenagers into polling booths for the first time.

The move will bring Japan — where political power resides firmly with the grey of hair — into line with other developed countries and will extend the franchise to an extra 2.4 million 18- and 19-year-olds.

And not before time, say teenagers. “Age 18 is not too young,” said 17-year-old high school student Shiori Toshima of the rule change, expected during the current parliament session ending in June. “I will definitely go to vote,” she said. “I’d be happy to see my opinion affect politics, even just a little.”

Japan last changed its voting rules after its 1945 surrender in World War II, altering the age at which citizens could cast their ballot from 25 to 20.

“Japan was one lap behind but is eventually catching up” with global standards, said Ryohei Takahashi, who teaches at Chuo University in Tokyo and runs a nonprofit group that promotes youth participation.

“In Japan, politics has excessively reflected elderly people’s voices, which we call silver democracy,” Takahashi said.

Around a quarter of Japan’s 127-million population is aged 65 or over, a result of low birth rates over the last few decades and no significant immigration. The proportion is expected to grow to around 40 per cent in a few decades.

The inverted age pyramid that this represents combined with a Confucian respect for elders and left Japan a country primarily run by, and for the benefit of, old people.

Young people ‘allergy’

Welfare — chiefly pensions and public health, but also unemployment payments and child benefits — costs Japan a whopping 31.5 trillion yen ($265 billion) a year, a third of its entire national budget.

As the number of pensioners increases, so will the cost of paying for them, at a time when the workforce — the number of people paying income tax — is shrinking.

Despite the diminishing tax base, politicians wary of the huge voting power of older people continue to pander to their desires.

“Old people vote for those who think of pensions, but for us it’s a good chance to express what society we would like to create when we grow up, “17-year-old Kumiko Ozawa said.

The Liberal Democratic Party of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, which has ruled Japan for most of the last 60 years, is seen as being particularly preoccupied by the grey vote — its power base is the countryside, where average ages are higher than in the cities.

“The LDP had been reluctant to lower the voting age as its lawmakers have put the emphasis on elderly and stable voters,” said Tomoaki Iwai, professor of politics at Nihon University in Tokyo.

“The LDP has traditionally believed that young people are liberal” and therefore likely to oppose its conservatism, Iwai said. “But its allergy to younger generations is gradually disappearing.”

In fact, says Takahashi, a mock election among young people held just ahead of the last national poll, with the result showing Abe’s LDP actually did better than in the vote that counted.

Austrian example

While Japan is playing catch-up on the age of majority with its rich-country colleagues — it is the only member of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development where someone becomes an adult at 20 — Austria has already struck a blow for youth.

In 2007, Vienna lowered the voting age to 16, giving a voice to an extra 140,000 people — 2.4 per cent of the electorate. Around two-thirds of them used their vote in recent polls.

However, if Austria’s experience is anything to go by, the LDP may be right to be wary of handing ballots to younger people.

“This age group has a tendency to vote against the establishment,” said Christoph Hofinger of Austria’s Institute for Social Research and Consulting, noting young Austrians disproportionately voted for green candidates or far right parties.

Even if the number of new voters created by the age change was not big enough to change electoral results, the fact of their being enfranchised was significant, he told AFP in Vienna.

“Participation by younger people helps to rebalance the ageing population,” he said.

“And while numerically, it hasn’t made much difference, it has encouraged political parties to consider issues that are important to younger people.

“For the parties, this can be seen as an investment in the future because people tend to stick with the party they vote for the first time.”

If, as expected, Japan’s parliament passes the legislation this summer, the first national election in which teenagers can vote is likely to be mid-2016, when half of the upper house is up for grabs.

Published in Dawn, May 2nd, 2015

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