Mike Smitka asks about what happened to the quiz? I saw his message just as the Lower House was voting--I was waiting to be sure about Q5. Here are the results:

1a. Party with the most seats: everyone said LDP

1b. How many seats? Everyone was way way off: LDP got 294; highest guess was 265 (Sarah Hyde) and most much lower.

2a. Most popular vote OR most PR vote (my mistake, wrote it different ways in different mails): Almost all said LDP.

2b. What share? Answering for Single Member district vote, which was 43%: Gerald Curtis was 41%, Michael
Strausz 40%. Answering for PR vote, which was
27.6%: Chris Winkler 28%.

3a. Ishin no Kai, number of seats was 54; Jun Okamoto said 51 and Ko Maeda 50

3b. What share? SMD vote was 11.6%; Ken'ichi Arriga said 12.5% and Sam Jameson said 10%. Answering for the PR vote, Ishin no Kai got 20.3%; Jun Okamoto said 20%

4. Who will be PM? Everyone said Abe.

5. Governing coalition (voting for Abe as PM): the
voting just concluded, and in the Lower House and the first ballot in the Upper House, the LDP and Koumeitou voted for Abe. Everyone had those two in the coalition but only four said only those two: Gerald Curtis, Ira Wolf, Chris Winkler, and Yukio Maeda.

6. The final question was which party would get the
most seats in the Upper House election next July. We have to wait for that one. Yukio had noted I should have asked how long the PM will serve, and Rick Katz just posed the same question, or anyway the over-and-under of 1 year. If you send Rick your guess he will tally it, and if you copy me I'll keep it till the results are out.

Yours, John
__________________________
>From John Creighton Campbell
Professor Emeritus of Political Science
University of Michigan
Visiting Scholar, Institute of Gerontology Tokyo University