| Hokkaido at-large district | |
| Type: | Parliamentary |
| Parl Name: | House of Councillors |
| District Label: | Prefecture |
| District: | Hokkaido |
| Electorate: | 4,424,026 (as of September 2022)[1] |
| Year: | 1947 |
| Seats: | 6 |
| Member Label: | Councillors |
| Member: | Class of 2019:Class of 2022: |
The Hokkaido at-large district is a constituency of the House of Councillors in the Diet of Japan (national legislature). It consists of the prefecture (dō) of Hokkai[dō] and is represented by six Councillors electing three at a time every three years by single non-transferable vote for six-year terms. In the election period from 2019 to 2022, Hokkaido's Councillors are (party affiliation as of September 2019):
After the House of Councillors had replaced the House of Peers according to the constitution of 1947, Hokkaido was represented by eight Councillors. In the early years of the 1955 System, all four seats went to the two major postwar parties, the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) and the Japan Socialist Party (JSP). But smaller parties such as the Japanese Communist Party (JCP) had a chance to pick up seats in Hokkaido as the vote share sufficient to gain a seat was often significantly below 20 percent. The high number of candidates increased the risk of vote splitting for the major parties: In 1974, two incumbent LDP candidates and conservative independent Tatsuo Takahashi ranked 5th, 6th and 7th leaving all four seats to the center-left to left opposition parties Kōmeitō, JSP and JCP.
In a major reapportionment in 1994 the number of Councillors from Hokkaido was halved to four. It became effective in the 1995 and 1998 elections. During the period as two-member district, Hokkaidō usually split seats evenly between opposition and ruling parties like most two-member districts – although the Democrats unsuccessfully aimed for both seats in the 2004, 2007 and 2010 elections. In another 2015 reapportionment, effective in the two classes from the 2016 and 2019 elections, Hokkaidō's representation in the upper house was raised to six.
| class of 1947 | election year | class of 1950 | ||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
| |
| Junsuke Itaya † (JLP) | Sueji Hori (Indep.) | Makoto Chiba (JSP) | Misao Kaga (Indep.)[2] | 1947[3] | Katsuzō Wakaki (Indep.)[4] | Gengo Kinoshita (JSP) | Keiki Machimura (Indep.)[5] | Yonesaburō Kobayashi (Indep.) [6] |
| Eiji Arima (DP) | 1950 incl. by-election[7] | Gengo Kinoshita (JSP) | Takashi Azuma (Farmers Cooperative Party) | Katsuzō Wakaki (JSP) | Sadayoshi Matsuura (Farmers Cooperative Party) | |||
| Makoto Chiba (JSP, left) | Katsutarō Kita (Indep.)[8] | Sueji Hori (Yoshida LP) | Eiji Arima (Progressive) | 1953[9] | ||||
| 1956[10] | Hidetoshi Tomabechi (LDP) | Tadashi Ōya (JSP) | Takashi Azuma (JSP) | Shinichi Nishida (LDP) | ||||
| Isao Yoneta (JSP) | Sueji Hori (LDP) | Ihei Ikawa (LDP) | Makoto Chiba (JSP) | 1959[11] | ||||
| 1962[12] | Tadashi Ōya (JSP) | Tokuichi Kobayashi (Indep.)[13] | Chūzaburō Yoshida (JSP) | |||||
| Seiichi Kawamura (JSP) | Ihei Ikawa (LDP) | Yūnosuke Takahashi (LDP) | Genshō Takeda (JSP) | 1965[14] | ||||
| 1968[15] | Yōichi Kawaguchi (LDP) | Shinichi Nishida (LDP) | Chūzaburō Yoshida (JSP) | |||||
| Yūnosuke Takahashi (LDP) | Seiichi Kawamura (JSP) | Genshō Takeda (JSP) | Masaichi Iwamoto (LDP) | 1971[16] | ||||
| 1974[17] | Sadako Ogasawara (JCP) | Chūzaburō Yoshida (JSP) | Takakatsu Tsushima (JSP) | Takehiko Aizawa (Kōmeitō) | ||||
| Shūji Kita (LDP) | Keiichi Nakamura (LDP) | Kaneyasu Marutani (JSP) | Seiichi Kawamura (JSP) | 1977[18] | ||||
| 1980[19] | Masaaki Takagi (LDP) | Masamitsu Iwamoto (LDP) | Sadako Ogasawara (JCP) | |||||
| Hisamitsu Sugano (JSP) | Masami Kudō (LDP) | 1983[20] | ||||||
| 1986[21] | Takakatsu Tsushima (JSP) | Masaaki Takagi (LDP) | ||||||
| Yasuko Takemura (Indep.)[22] | Shūji Kita (LDP) | Yūko Takasaki (JCP) | 1989[23] | |||||
| 1992[24] | Hisashi Kazama (Kōmeitō) | Noriyuki Nakao (Indep.)[25] | Naoki Minezaki (JSP) | Masaaki Takagi (LDP) | ||||
| Hisamitsu Sugano (JSP) | Katsuya Ogawa (NFP) | – | 1995[26] | |||||
| 1998[27] | Naoki Minezaki (DPJ) | Yoshio Nakagawa (LDP) | – | |||||
| Chūichi Date (LDP) | Katsuya Ogawa (DPJ) | 2001[28] | ||||||
| 2004[29] | Yoshio Nakagawa (LDP) | Naoki Minezaki (DPJ) | ||||||
| Katsuya Ogawa (DPJ) | Chūichi Date (LDP) | 2007[30] | ||||||
| 2010[31] | Gaku Hasegawa (LDP) | Eri Tokunaga (DPJ) | ||||||
| Chūichi Date (LDP) | Katsuya Ogawa (DPJ) | 2013[32] | ||||||
| 2016[33] | Eri Tokunaga (DP) | Yoshio Hachiro (DP) | – | |||||
| Harumi Takahashi (LDP) | Kenji Katsube (CDP) | Tsuyohito Iwamoto (LDP) | – | 2019[34] | ||||
Notes: