A new combined electoral method was adopted in the Japanese House of Representatives election, beginning with the 1996 general election. Three hundred seats are elected by the single-seat constituency system and the other by the proportional representation system. There was some argument that the adoption of the single-member constituency system gave a strong advantage to the most dominant party. However, no analysis has been made so far to confirm the electoral bias of the single-member constituency system in Japanese elections.
Extensive research measuring electoral biases has been published in the US and UK contexts. The electoral process in those two countries is the single-member constituency and the two major party system, respectively. However, Japan has numerous parties. In the 1993 general election the largest party was divided and coalition governments have since appeared. To clarify the electoral biases under the multiparty system, the electoral bias of the 1996 general election was analyzed. Because some parties could not field candidates for some constituencies, votes for parties with no candidates did not exist in those constituencies. However, the conventional method (Gudign and Taylor, 1979) for measuring electoral bias requires a vote ratio for all parties in all constituencies. To overcome this problem, we used the voting data from the proportional representation system in each municipality zone as the unbiased votes for five major parties: the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP); New Frontier Party (NFP); Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ); Japan Communist Party (JCP); and Social Democratic Party (SDP).
First, following the Gudign and Taylor (1979) method, the Japanese electoral biases were decomposed into the malapportionment and the waste-vote bias (Fig. 2). The former is clearly smaller than the latter. The magnitude of the latter is far bigger than the expected bias by the cube law, even if we take into account the variation of constituency zoning (Table 1). The power function model (equation 5) shows that the estimate of the bias-magnitude parameter is greater than four (Table 1). This indicates that the multiparty system tends to cause larger electoral bias than the two major party system.
Second, another simulation is executed with the assumption that voters do not vote if there is no candidate from their preferred party for each constituency. As a result, we obtained a more realistic relationship between the ratios of votes and seats than in the first simulation. Because the sizes of the parties are relatively small under the multiparty situation, parties cannot field candidates for all constituencies. Parties tend to field candidates only for constituencies where there is significant support. This “efficient” strategy reduces the number of wasted votes. At the same time, it does not reduce but hides the large electoral bias in the single-member constituency system.
Finally, we investigated the regional effects of electoral bias. Shimizu (1959) previously demonstrated the malapportionment in the Japanese electoral system: the weight of votes in nonmetropolitan areas is unfairly heavy because the allocation of population for nonmetropolitan constituencies is small. The multiparty system is recognized in metropolitan areas that tend to have manifold party support of voters and more candidates than nonmetropolitan ones. Here we can consider a low probability of wasted votes as the strength of the vote. Thus it should be concluded that the regional difference in the degree of the multiparty situation expands the regional gap between the strength of one vote in metropolitan and nonmetropolitan areas: a metropolitan vote becomes weaker and a nonmetropolitan vote stronger. In other words, introducing the single-member constituency system in Japan expands the regional gap between the strength of one vote.

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The purpose of this paper is to clarify the structure of spatial cognition through the analysis of place name cognition in a mountainous village under the urban shadow. After collecting 90 place names in a farmland area, the author investigated how 63 residents recognized those place names. Based on their cognition level, these residents were classified into five groups. The author extracted the various factors affecting place name acquisition in order to elucidate the formation process of spatial cognition.
First, residents started to recognize both the names and locations of their own farmland. For this cognition, residents' engagement in agriculture and the occupation of their parents and spouses were important factors in terms of place name succession. Then, residents increased their sphere of cognition and degree of cognition to other farmland. This cognition was explained mainly by agricultural engagement, occupation, participation in kukai (neighborhood association), kuyaku (traditional mutual aid in farming), etc.
Each group has different conditions for place name cognition. Residents belonging to groups 1 and 2 recognize most of the farmland names and locations in Tobain-shimo hamlet. Based upon their agricultural activities they maintained the traditional way of living in their rural society. They are engaged in agriculture and have participated in kukai, kuyaku, and domochikou (traditional mutual aid in cultivating wasteland and forest land) activities since the beginning of the 1950s. Therefore place names were commonly used by residents because they had ample opportunity to use place names.
Residents belonging to groups 3 and 4 recognize most of their own farmland's names and locations. Most of them are engaged in off-farm jobs. They took advantage of employment opportunities in the high economic growth period in the 1960s and early 1970s, They are now engaged in agriculture only on weekends and annual holidays. Thus their contact with agricultural land is limited to the farmland they cultivate themselves. Although they have acquired the place names of their own farmland, they have not acquired those of other households.
On the other hand, residents belonging to group 5 have weak cognition of the place names of their own farmland. They took jobs in the 1980s when off-farm jobs penetrated rural society. For residents who are engaged only in off-farm jobs, the socioeconomic importance of farmland is relatively low. In addition, these residents, mainly women, have never joined kukai and kuyaku. As a result, they cannot understand the meanings of place names. It is concluded that farmland has become merely scenery without place name cognition in recognized rural spaces.

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