6/25/2020 Details of 1999 (Gyo-Tsu) 35 | Judgments of the Supreme Court which some voters were given preference because of status, income, gender etc., is apparently against the Constitution, and distorts the principle of rule by majority which is the basis of modern democracy. 4 When the election system for the members of the Diet was established after the Second World War, a system in which each prefecture was made a constituency was introduced and the discrepancy of maximum 1:2.62 was allowed. It cannot be denied that this generated a tendency to take the equality principle in the election of the members of both houses lightly, which still exists today. This discrepancy which was allowed without much doubt emerged between Miyagi and Tottori prefectures and had nothing to do with 'giving favourable consideration to depopulated areas'. However, the fact that the existence of such a large discrepancy was allowed led to the neglect of the problem of a totally different kind of discrepancy emanating from the concentration of population in the cities as a result of the subsequent large scale flow of population for many years under the pretext of giving favourable consideration to depopulated areas. This tendency was not limited to the election of the members of the House of Councillors, but spread to the election of the members of the House of Representatives. On this issue, the judiciary continued to be tolerant, based upon the idea that it is sufficient to decide whether the broad discretionary power granted to the Diet in establishing the election system was exceeded or not. As a result, accumulated judgments of the Supreme Court are understood to be based upon the view that for the election of the members of the House of Representatives, a maximum discrepancy of 1:3 is allowed, and for the election of the members of the House of Councillors from constituencies, a maximum discrepancy of 1:6 is allowed to be within the scope of a reasonable discretionary power of the Diet. 5 Amendments to the Law on Public Election which have taken place in recent years failed to introduce changes necessary to observe the equality principle in a sufficient way. The amended Law on Public Election which is at issue in the present case is of insufficient quality, since the basic policy of the amendment is to keep the discrepancy in constituency elections at less that 1:2 (which means attributing the value of two votes to a single vote) despite the fact that the value of the vote of an individual is the same as the others. Taking this as granted, the 'plus one' system was introduced (this is really an apparent and arbitrary manipulation of the value of votes), and had created exceptions in exceeding 1:2 in 28 of 300 constituencies in the light of the Census of October 1990 from the beginning. In these two points, the Law has failed to observe the equality principle which is the basic prerequisite to representative democracy as provided by the Constitution and, as explained in the following, there is no reason to justify this. Firstly, the Constitution does not allow intentional manipulation and differentiation in the value of votes of the electors (voters) by those who are elected (members of the Diet). I would like to repeat that when shaping the system of election, 'giving favourable consideration to depopulated areas' should not accompany 'neglect of densely populated areas'. It is a prerequisite to the enactment of laws concerning election that the equality in the value of votes is realised by consolidation of constituencies or increase in the number of seats in proportion to the number of voters (the latter may be against the requirement of slimming down ruling organisations, but such a requirement has much less priority in quality in comparison with the significance of the equality principle as provided by the Constitution). Secondly, there is a view which treats prefectures in the same way as states in a federal state and give priority to the significance of the demarcation of constituency boundaries based upon the prefectural system ahead of the equality principle, but this is not acceptable either. It is obvious that Japan is not a federal state, and no provision can be found in the Constitution which gives less significance to the equality principle between prefectures which are basically administrative divisions and allows the discrepancy in the value of votes. In countries with a federal system which have a written constitution, there is an explicit provision in the Constitution if a state https://www.courts.go.jp/app/hanrei_en/detail?id=458 13/23