Osaka City mayoral election under way

The mayoral election will be held on November 30 in Osaka, Japan's second largest city with a population of 2.6 million. Campaigning is under way over policy priority between two candidates: Watanabe Takeru, backed by the Japanese Communist party, trade unions, and many democratic organizations, and Seki Jun'ichi supported by the Liberal Democratic, Democratic, Komei and Social Democratic parties.

Candidate Watanabe says that wasteful expenditures for large-scale development projects are the root cause of the city's financial crisis and reduced budgets in welfare services and education, and calls for tax money to be used to improve public services in citizens' interests.

Candidate Seki has declared that he would follow the former city administration policy of promoting large-scale development projects even after the city's failure to host the 2008 Olympic Games.

Osaka City is 5.56 trillion yen in debt (2.14 million yen per citizen), using nearly 100 billion yen every year for large development projects. The number of households living on welfare assistance has increased fourfold during the last four years to 65,000 of the city's 1.2 million households. The number of homeless people is 10,000, larger than in any other Japanese city. (end)