Japanese Election

The Japanese election for the lower house of parliament was August 30, 2009. All of the predictions are for the Liberal Democratic Party, which has been the majority party almost since 1955, to be soundly defeated. The expectation is for a complete reversal. Before the election the LDP had about 300 seats in the Diet and the Democratic Party of Japan had only about 100. The election is expected to reverse those numbers.

I began an Archivist search a.m. on the 29th. The program did not find as many as 1500 micro messages; finding roughly 1300 going back to August 17th. We are told the DJP party leader was running an Obama-like campaign, but it does not seem to have resulted in lots of messages at Twitter. However, if the twitter messages were in Japanese the search may well have missed them. But I have no way to find out if they are in Japanese and being missed.

The election came and went. There were few micro messages leading up to the election and only a few interpreting the results. It is time to quit collecting messages -- September 12. The total number of messages found was 4179. The timeline for the messages was

The .txt file that can be read by Excel to acquire the data is: japan election.txt