2012 Japanese general election
general election in Japan held in 2012
General elections were held in Japan on 16 December 2012. The Liberal Democratic Party won a landslide victory, ejecting the Democratic Party from power after three years. It was the fourth worst defeat suffered by a ruling party in Japanese history.
Voting took place in all representatives' constituencies of Japan including proportional blocks, in order to appoint Members of Diet to seats in the House of Representatives, the lower house of the National Diet of Japan.
In July 2012, it was reported that the deputy prime minister Katsuya Okada had approached the Liberal Democratic Party to sound them out about dissolving the House of Representatives and holding the election in January 2013. An agreement was reached in August to dissolve the Diet and hold early elections "shortly" following the passage of a bill to raise the national consumption tax. Some right-wing observers asserted that as the result of introducing the consumption tax to repay the Japanese public debt, the DPJ lost around 75% of its pre-election seats.
Background
The LDP had governed Japan for all but three years since 1955. However, in the 2009 election, the LDP suffered the worst defeat of a sitting government in modern Japanese history. Due to the characteristics of the Japanese election system, DPJ candidates won 308 seats in the House of Representatives (64.2% of seats), enabling Yukio Hatoyama to become prime minister.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “2012 Japanese general election” as general election in Japan held in 2012. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The subject matters to the history & society register because the source frames it as general election in Japan held in 2012. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
Chronology, provenance and viewpoint should be read together before a broad social or political interpretation is accepted. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 14, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q866266. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2012, 2013, 1955 and 2009.
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This entry incorporates text from “2012 Japanese general election” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.