Fumiya Satoh, a manga artist who draws a boy detective story “Kindaichi Shonen no Jikenbo” which has been sold 80 million copies, who is also a director of culture of the Happiness Realization Party, had a press announcement of her running for coming national election of the house of representative with blotting out herself with her drawing character with voice actress video.
She says (actually wrote scripts read by the voice actress) criticizes her planned opponent, a manga-fan prime minister Taro Aso and his Liberal Democratic Party policy in the video by telling it would be a manga fan and manga author’s competition.
Japanese people are known by their tendency to prefer being anonymous, but running national election campaign with manga character is uncommon at all. I have never heard similar case before.
The Happiness Realization Party was formed this year by a buddhism-based new religious organization “Koufuku no Kagaku” (Happy Science), to aim to win the national election, as they say. The party seems to utilize YouTube and other web media for this election.
