As a member of Hokkaido's Ainu community, Kaori Tahara says, she has often felt the need to improve the lot of her indigenous ethnic group and other victims of discrimination, but it wasn't until a few years ago that she started thinking about running for the Diet.
That was when Tahara met Muneo Suzuki, a disgraced lawmaker from Hokkaido who was once a bigwig in the Liberal Democratic Party. Suzuki asked Tahara, who was researching the Ainu at an institute in Paris, to join a new party he was about to launch.
So she ran in the general election in summer 2005 on the New Party Daichi ticket because she thought it was "the only party looking to improve our life in Hokkaido," she said in a recent interview. One of the party's election pledges is to protect the rights of the Ainu as an indigenous people.