Hyōgo at-large district
Japan House of Councillors constituency
The Hyogo at-large district (Japanese: 兵庫県選挙区, Hepburn: Hyōgo-ken senkyoku) is a constituency that represents Hyogo Prefecture in the House of Councillors in the Diet of Japan. It used to have five Councillors in the 242-member house, but this representation increased to six by July 2019.
Outline
The constituency represents the entire Hyogo Prefecture, which includes the urban centres of Kobe and the Hanshin region, as well as the rural areas to the north and west of the prefecture and Awaji Island. The district has 4,644,254 registered voters as of June 2016, the eighth-highest in the country. The Councillors currently representing Hyogo are:
Shinsuke Suematsu (Liberal Democratic Party (LDP); term ends in 2016)
Shunichi Mizuoka (Democratic Party; term ends in 2016)
Yoshitada Konoike (LDP; term ends in 2019)
Takayuki Shimizu (elected as a Japan Restoration Party candidate, currently belongs to Initiatives from Osaka; term ends in 2019)
Representation in the House
From the first House of Councillors election in 1947 until the 1992 election, Hyogo elected six Councillors in two sets of three at elections held every three years. Under 1994 electoral reform Hyogo's representation was reduced to four (two sets of two), which took effect from the 1995 election. Twenty years later, the district had the same level of representation as not only the Hokkaido and Fukuoka districts, which also had more than 4 million voters each, but also the Niigata, Miyagi and Nagano districts, which each had less than 2 million voters. To address this malapportionment in representation, a 2015 revision of the Public Officers Election Law increased the representation of the Hyogo, Hokkaido and Fukuoka districts to six Councillors; this change began to take effect at the July 2016 election, at which three Councillors were elected by the district for the first time since 1992. The district's representation will return to six Councillors at the next election, due by July 2019. At the same time, the Niigata, Miyagi and Nagano districts will be reduced to two Councillors.
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