Japanese House of Councillors election, 2001

1998 ←

29 July 2001

→ 2004

121 (73 SNTV, 48 proportional) of 247 seats in the House of Councillors

	First party	Second party

Leader	Junichiro Koizumi	Yukio Hatoyama
Party	Liberal Democratic	Democratic
Last election	103	47
Seats won	111	59
Seat change	+8	+12
Popular vote	22,299,825 (result for 73 SNTV seats)	10,066,552 (result for 73 SNTV seats)
Percentage	41.04% (result for 73 SNTV seats)	18.53% (result for 73 SNTV seats)

President of the House
of Councillors before election

Yutaka Inoue
Liberal Democratic

Elected President of the House
of Councillors

Yutaka Inoue
Liberal Democratic

Elections for the Japanese House of Councillors were held in Japan on 29 July 2001. It was the first national election since Junichiro Koizumi was appointed as prime minister after Yoshiro Mori resigned in April 2001. The Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) and its election allies, were the major winner, provided Koizumi a strong mandates to move forward with his reform policies. The ruling coalition performed well, and regain their majority in the House of Councillors.

* Two seats were vacant by the law at the time of election.

The electoral reform enacted in 2000 became effective for the first time:

As a result of the party realignments of the 1990s, several two-member districts were represented by two Councillors from the same party before the 2001 election. Some of these Councillors lost the official nomination of their party (e.g. in Niigata), others retired (Hokkaidō, Tochigi). Most of these district split seats between ruling coalition and opposition again, in the case of both incumbents seeking re-election resulting in one of the two losing their seat (Nagano, Shizuoka).

The 2001 election was the first to use an open list system (非拘束名簿式) to elect proportional representation seats in the House. Under this system, voters may vote for either a political party or a specific candidate. The proportional seats are distributed among the parties by D'Hondt method according to their overall proportional votes, including candidate votes. The ranking of candidates on each party list is then determined by the candidate votes.

The results for the major parties were as follows (decimals omitted):

The final ranking of PR candidates and their individual vote counts were as follows:

1. Yoichi Masuzoe (LDP) 1,588,262

2. Kenji Koso (LDP) 478,985

3. Kyosen Ohashi (DPJ) 412,087

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