Nara Mayor Gen Nakagawa, 41, was declared the winner of Sunday's mayoral election by just 2,000 votes Monday morning, a narrow difference that election officials say was caused by voter confusion.
But Nakagawa and his chief rival Makoto Yamashita, 49, who both ran without party support, crushed Liberal Democratic Party-backed candidate Yoshiko Asahiro, 56, by more than 100,000 votes as the backlash against the ruling party seen in the July 2 Tokyo Metropolitan Assembly election continued to reverberate.
Nakagawa, who won a third term, finished the race with 61,934 votes to challenger Yamashita's 59,912 — a margin of just 2,022 votes. The turnout rate was 51 percent.