International Intern student 
Michael Pasahow　

The other week was a fascinating contrast between the “new style” campaigning that Suzuki-sensei is doing with his Internet TV show and more traditional political campaigning. Instead of going into Suzuki-sensei’s offices in Nagata-cho, I instead woke up at 4:45AM and caught one of the first trains out of Gyotoku across Tokyo and into Kanagawa, arriving at my destination at 7 AM. All I knew was that I was supposed to contact Shidehara-san by phone when I got there and I would find out more about the sort of campaigning I was going to be doing. I phoned her from the station, and soon saw a young woman in a flamingly bright red nylon jacket walking in my direction and holding a thick stack of fliers. Outside I could see several people wearing similar jackets and handing out their fliers to passers-by. I was given a jacket and a stack of perhaps 65 fliers and started to attempt to hand them out.
My Japanese skills are never that good. They are especially poor when I am running on around 5 hours of sleep and not enough coffee. Thus, while exhorting passers-by to take fliers, I would occasionally slip up and not say something like “Ohayo, Orita Akiko desu”, but instead “Ohaiko desu” or something of the sort and attempt to pass off the fliers to people who looked at me like I was mocking their language. Obviously, I was not going to be successful until I woke up, which took around ten minutes. After I was slightly more awake, I started noticing that my "Gaikokujin" status was making my campaigning efforts quite different than my fellow DPJ campaign workers.
When a commuter bus would pull into the station and disgorge its contents of sleepy sararimen and OLs, we would all maneuver so that the passengers would have to pass by us and potentially take a flier before they could enter the station. I was usually second or third in the line of DPJ campaign workers handing out fliers, so I expected that those who were interested in taking a flier had already done so and I would not have much luck with disposing of my stack. Instead, I found that people who had walked by the first two workers would take a flier from me, sometimes making eye contact and smiling as they did so. Additionally, those who were not interested in a flier would often make the hand sign for “dame” instead of just walking by. Occasionally someone would either accept or decline a flier using English instead of Japanese, even though I was offering the fliers in Japanese. It seemed that I was not expected to speak the language or understand the customs, and I should therefore be treated with a larger degree of politeness than my fellow workers.
Perhaps this was why I was able to pass out my stack of fliers somewhat faster than those around me. I certainly found that, if nothing else, the commuters would give me a second look as they passed, as if their brains were processing the sight of a gaijin in a red DPJ jacket and handing out fliers for the local candidate at 7:30 in the morning. In any event, we were finished with our work by around 8:30, when the commute buses started to slow down and the crowd thinned out. I am still amazed every morning by the sheer number of people streaming into rail stations and bus stops in order to move around the Tokyo area, and how quickly they are all shuffled off to work or school.
After finishing, the group of DPJ workers took me to breakfast, which I greatly appreciated, as I was not only able to finally fill my stomach, but I was also able to eat a real American-style breakfast for the first time in around a month. During breakfast I was introduced to many people, all of whom worked either for the party itself or for various Diet members; it seemed typical for staffers to do party work in addition to working directly for their member. Once we had finished breakfast I was shown the highlight of my day: the local DPJ sound truck.
I had seen a sound truck before, outside Meiji shrine in Harajuku, and it honestly was somewhat frightening. It was a giant black van, covered in Japanese flags and old Japanese Naval flags alongside right-wing slogans, and the man inside speaking into the microphone seemed to be eager to, more than anything else, shock the crowd into listening to his xenophobia by hurling insults at anyone who got within 30 meters of the truck. The DPJ sound truck, on the other hand, was almost cute in its stature, painted bright red (like the jackets), and played a soothing melody when the honey-voiced young woman at the microphone was not saying good morning to the neighborhood and urging them to vote for Orita Akiko-san. The rest of us (except for the driver, of course) leaned out the windows and greeted passers-by. Like most sound trucks, we were largely ignored, except when I greeted someone walking down the street. The typical reaction to seeing a tall, white-skinned and red-headed gaijin waving out the window of a sound truck and saying good morning in Japanese was complete shock and a stunned stare. I was quite proud of myself.
Like American politics, Japanese political campaigning seems to follow set patterns. In America, for example, we would simply not expect to see a man in a giant chicken suit handing out fliers on a street corner and asking passers-by to vote for a particular candidate. In Japan, it seems that gaijin are not thought of as part of the political process, for perfectly understandable reasons: we don’t vote here. My presence in a political environment was probably something entirely new to the people I greeted from the truck or asked to take a flier, and they reacted entirely differently to me than they would have to a fellow Japanese. I hope that, if nothing else, this different reaction made Orita-san stick in their memory more than it would have otherwise, and I wish her the best of luck in her life.

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