Kyoto 2nd district

Kyōto 2nd district (京都府第2区 Kyōto-fu dai-ni-ku or simply 京都2区 Kyōto niku) is a constituency of the House of Representatives in the Diet of Japan. It is located in central Kyoto and consists of the Kyoto city wards of Sakyō, Higashiyama and Yamashina. As of 2012, 267,926 eligible voters were registered in the district.

Before the electoral reform of 1994, the area formed part of Kyoto 1st district where five Representatives had been elected by single non-transferable vote (SNTV).

Kyoto had been a traditional stronghold of the Japanese Communist Party (JCP); but following the electoral reform that replaced the SNTV multi-member districts with FPTP single-member districts, the JCP could only win the new Kyoto 3rd district while losing the other three districts in Kyoto city (Kyoto 1, 2 and 4) in the 1996 general election, the first under the new system. In the 2nd district JCP newcomer Satoshi Inoue lost narrowly to Liberal Democrat Mikio Okuda who had previously represented the old multi-member 1st district. Democrat Seiji Maehara ranked third, but won a seat via the Kinki PR block. After the main opposition New Frontier Party had dissolved and its successor groups had mainly been absorbed by the Democratic Party, Maehara won Kyoto 2 in the 2000 general election and has held onto the seat since. Maehara went on to become Democratic Party president in 2005, but resigned following the Livedoor scandal in 2006 and later was a minister of state in the Democratic-led Hatoyama and Kan cabinets.

List of Representatives

Representative	Party		Dates	Notes
Mikio Okuda		LDP	1996 – 2000	Retired from politics in 2000
Seiji Maehara		DPJ	2000 –	Incumbent

Election results

2012

Party		Candidate	Votes	%	±%
	DPJ – PNP	Seiji Maehara	72,170	49.4
	LDP	Kōji Uenaka	42,017	28.7
	JCP	Toshifumi Hara	24,633	16.8
	SDP	Dai Satō	7,416	5.1

2009

Party		Candidate	Votes	%	±%
	DPJ (PNP support)	Seiji Maehara	101,151
	LDP (Kōmeitō support)	Tomohiro Yamamoto	42,771
	JCP	Toshifumi Hara	25,856
	SDP	Takakage Fujita	5,028
	HRP	Yoshiteru Karube	1,045
Turnout			178,905	66.31

2005

Party		Candidate	Votes	%	±%
	DPJ	Seiji Maehara	73,795
	LDP	Tomohiro Yamamoto (elected by PR)	69,330
	JCP	Toshifumi Hara	29,348
Turnout			175,879	64.5

2003

Party		Candidate	Votes	%	±%
	DPJ	Seiji Maehara	73,934
	LDP	Naohiko Yamamoto	47,962
	JCP	Toshifumi Hara	26,768
Turnout			151,842	55.37

2000

Party		Candidate	Votes	%	±%
	DPJ	Seiji Maehara	52,077
	LDP	Naohiko Yamamoto	48,057
	JCP	Satoshi Inoue	41,541
	LP	Tōru Taniguchi	11,296
	LL	Masae Toita	2,691

1996

Party		Candidate	Votes	%	±%
	LDP	Mikio Okuda	43,060
	JCP	Satoshi Inoue	42,211
	DPJ	Seiji Maehara (elected by PR)	31,257
	NFP	Kenji Hishida	30,713
Turnout			150,165	54.75