Every Vote Counts

We have a 3 day weekend here in Japan. Mon (today) is the Health Sports Day (Taiiku-no-Hi), a day when we are all encouraged to exercise apparently. But more importantly, we have the day off. That's what's really important :)

We had a mayor election for the city of Shinagawa, where I live, yesterday (Sun). You know when elections are coming up in Japan. The candidates go around in their vans w/ speakers making sure you remember their names by repeatedly yelling out their names on the microphone. They do talk about their policies and stuff a little but every other sentence is "My name is so-and-so. Remember my name! Please put down my name on your ballot!". I guess it's a pretty effective strategy since unless you really care about the local politics, you are likely to pick a name that sound familiar... which was what I ended up doing.

For the past a few weeks, the candidates went from a station to station in their district each morning greeting "their voters" on their way to work. It's bad enough you have to go to work and they were just making it worse by blasting their names out on the speakers early in the morning. So many times, I was tempted to just snatch their precious mic from them and just toss'em away. I'm sure if it wasn't illegal, many people would've done that.. seriously, I don't know how they can get away w/ doing that w/o getting noise complaints. They all looked like typical politicians too, w/ fakey smiles and everything...

So I fulfilled my responsibility as a registered voter by going to the booth and casting my vote once again. I really don't know much about politics and I must admit that I really don't follow it too much. Yea, I may have voted for someone whose policies I hardly knew. But I believe the action of going to vote is almost as important as who you actually vote for... a vote is a vote no matter how you cast it, who you choose or how you choose the person. And every vote does count, believe it or not. It's easy to say "my vote won't make a difference anyway so I'm not gonna even bother". But then you really can't expect the government to be responsible for you when you are not being a responsible citizen yourself. Well, that's how I see it anyways.