Thanks to Japan's fairness guidelines, NHK offers free air time to all political parties participating in national and regional elections, a service that earlier this month resulted in the leader of the Party to Protect Citizens From NHK, which advocates the elimination of NHK's mandatory viewing fees, appearing on the broadcaster and calling for its destruction.

Otherwise, the official campaign for the House of Councilors election has been pretty boring, since those fairness guidelines restrict the press from covering any candidate or party more than any other candidate or party during the designated period. It's one reason why they conduct so many voter surveys: It's an ostensibly equitable form of newsgathering. Although results differed in terms of how much better one party was doing compared to another, they all pointed to two outcomes: The ruling Liberal Democratic Party would, again, win a sizable majority and voter turnout would be low, maybe lower than ever.

These two projections are closely related in that, traditionally, lower turnout benefits the LDP. They also feed on each other, further dampening public interest with the feeling that voting is pointless if the outcome is already so certain. This aspect was taken up by literary critic Minako Saito in her July 10 column in Tokyo Shimbun. Saito wasn't convinced the LDP would win by such a huge margin and she believed that there was still room for surprises. Citing surveys that found around half of respondents undecided, she suggested that the electorate's determination was still "fluid."