Wishes on a Tanabata Strip: The Tokyo Gubernatorial Election

The Tokyo gubernatorial election has concluded.I wrote various things about it before,but the election took place on Tanabata, July 7th, and as soon as the polls closed, reports emerged that Governor Yuriko Koike had secured a third term. This was what is known as a 'zero-call' victory.

There are likely various opinions regarding the results. In this age of advanced social media, many people are commenting on politics and the outcome of this election. I am one of them.
Among these, I occasionally see posts saying things like, 'I cannot accept this result.' Certainly, if you cast your vote for a candidate you believed in and they do not win, it is only natural for anyone to find the election result difficult to accept. It is a very natural state of mind.

However, this is also the limitation of democracy, which is decided by majority rule.
Majority rule is cruel; it is a system where everything other than the opinion supported by the most people is ignored. In other words, democracy is not about everyone getting exactly what they want. If you want to live in a way where things always go 'your way,' you are required to constantly pander to the masses.

This is the strange part: even though democracy is a political system where the people hold the power of decision, it also means that there will always be some people who feel frustrated because things did not go their way.
The 'people' who hold the power of decision refer only to those who happen to be in the majority at that time. It is not uncommon for someone who thought they were part of the 'people' with decision-making power to find themselves alienated from that group as their own thoughts and way of life change.

Recently, there have been cases where election campaigns have been disrupted by violence or obstruction. This itself must never be tolerated. However, when considering the underlying causes, perhaps some people resort to violence while harboring pent-up anger as they feel alienated from the 'people' who hold the power of decision. One might criticize this mentality as being truly immature, but humans are not so well-constructed that we can avoid such things.

In a political landscape with few choices, the anger of frustrated people exists structurally within democracy.
That is precisely why a politician who wins an election based on the principle of majority rule must look not only to the voters who supported them, but also to those voters somewhere out there who wrote their wishes on the 'Tanabata strip' of a ballot paper, only to feel frustrated when things did not go their way.