Running as an independent, Shintaro Ishihara overwhelmingly won the Tokyo gubernatorial election, the most closely watched of local elections held nationwide April 11. Voter interest in the election was strong. Despite the inclement weather earlier that day, voter turnout was 58 percent, up 7 percentage points from the previous election.
Of the six major contenders, Ishihara, a former LDP lawmaker, won 1.66 million votes. Kunio Hatoyama, who was backed by the Democratic Party of Japan, was next with 850,000, followed by independent Yoichi Masuzoe with 830,000. Former U.N. Undersecretary General Yasushi Akashi, supported by the Liberal Democratic Party, came in fourth with 690,000 votes, followed by Man Mikami, the Japan Communist Party candidate, with 660,000 and former Foreign Minister Koji Kakizawa with 630,000. Kakizawa was expelled by the LDP when he entered the race against the party's wishes. Ishihara won 30 percent of the votes, twice as many as Hatoyama. The election results showed that the three independents won more votes than expected, while the three candidates backed by major parties lost badly.
The results also showed that voters were distancing themselves from political parties. Individual candidates' images and voter appeal had decisive influence on the results. In other words, candidates' potential leadership abilities to deal with difficulties facing Tokyo and Japan swayed voter judgment. But it is next to impossible to define those leadership abilities.