Exciting! Kind of. It's election day in Tokyo, and our slightly hawkish, notoriously racist, Mickey-Mouse-hating governor, Shintaro Ishihara, is hoping to keep his position as top dog. We'll see what happens.
When you run for office in Japan, you can only start campaigning 2 weeks before election day. Things like how and where you can run around promoting yourself are very highly regulated. While in the US, every presidential candidate has a MySpace page and governor avatars are running around giving publicity stunt speeches on Second Life, campaigning online was monitored and banned in the days preceding today's ballots. Earlier today, Cyber Agent Inc., which is kind of like YouTube, announce that they had deleted all the campaign broadcasts posted by users on their site per the request of the election management committee of the city of Tokyo. The committee sent the same request to YouTube, but of course, the GooTube is way too important to be honoring requests like that.
It's not okay for you to make a website for your campaign, but it IS ok to have a sexy robot woman encouraging people to vote.
In a completely rational world, such a guy would not be re-elected, but as MSN Mainichi Daily News reports, he's up against an inventor, a street musician, a taxi driver, and a fortune teller. Hmmmm. I wonder who will win?
We'll find out soon enough.
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