Photo/Illutration Voters in the Yamaguchi No. 2 district listen to a speech in the Lower House by-election campaign in Iwakuni, Yamaguchi Prefecture, on April 11. (Jun Ueda)

A member of a prominent political family is leading in a Lower House by-election race in Yamaguchi Prefecture despite nearly half of voters opposed to “hereditary politics,” an Asahi Shimbun survey showed.

Voting will be held on April 23 for the Diet seat representing the Yamaguchi No. 2 district.

Nobuchiyo Kishi, 31, the son of Nobuo Kishi, a former defense minister whose resignation for health reasons prompted the by-election, is ahead of Hideo Hiraoka, 69, a justice minister under the Democratic Party of Japan administration, who is running as an independent.

The candidacy of Kishi, who is backed by the ruling Liberal Democratic Party, is seen as a classic example of “hereditary politics,” in which politicians’ children become lawmakers by taking over their parents’ “turfs.”

According to the survey conducted on April 14 and 15, 49 percent of respondents in the Yamaguchi No. 2 district said hereditary politics was “undesirable,” and 70 percent of them plan to vote for Hiraoka.

Only 23 percent of respondents said hereditary politics was desirable. Nearly 90 percent of them said they would cast their ballots for Kishi, according to the survey.

Twenty-eight percent in the survey chose “other or no answer” for their opinion about hereditary politics.

Among LDP supporters, 38 percent believed that hereditary politics was desirable, slightly more than the 35 percent who said it was not.

Among unaffiliated voters, 58 percent were not in favor of hereditary politics, much more than 12 percent who approved of it.

The Asahi Shimbun conducted the survey by contacting fixed telephone numbers of voters in the Yamaguchi No. 2 district selected at random by computer.

The survey takers received 604 valid responses, or 67 percent, from 902 fixed numbers of households with at least one eligible voter each.

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