My 18-year-old son told me he doesn’t follow politics. He said this with the casual certainty of someone stating an obvious fact. Then, without consulting his parents, he used an election matching website to research candidates, gathered his friends and went to vote for the first time.
He is not unusual.
On Sunday, Japanese voters handed Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi’s Liberal Democratic Party a historic victory — 316 seats, exceeding the two-thirds supermajority threshold and surpassing even the Democratic Party of Japan’s 308-seat record from their 2009 landslide. Turnout rose to approximately 56%, up from 53.85% in 2024, despite the election being held in February for the first time in 36 years.
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