Japan's lower house has served its full four years only once since 1952
Members of Japan's House of Representatives are elected for four years, but prime ministers almost always dissolve the chamber early. Since the American occupation ended in 1952, only the house of 1976 ran its full course. Each dissolution even gets a nickname, the most notorious being the you idiot dissolution of 1953.
That 1953 episode began when Prime Minister Shigeru Yoshida insulted people at a budget committee meeting; on March 14 he dissolved the house and called an election. In practice, postwar legislatures have lasted a median of about three years. The lower house can be dissolved by the prime minister or brought down by a no-confidence vote, whereas the upper House of Councillors, elected for six-year terms, cannot be dissolved at all.
Today the chamber has 465 members. Of these, 289 win single-member districts and 176 come from party lists in 11 regional blocs. Because the two halves are counted separately, a parallel system, larger parties gain an edge. The lower house is the stronger chamber: it can override the upper house with a two-thirds vote, and on the budget, treaties and choosing the prime minister the Councillors can only delay. Citizens can vote from 18, lowered from 20 in 2016, and stand for the lower house from 25.
The body dates to 1890, when the Meiji Constitution created an Imperial Diet modelled on Germany and Britain. The elected lower house faced a hereditary House of Peers able to kill bills it disliked, such as votes for women or union rights, and governments answered to the Emperor rather than the Diet. Still, control of the budget gave representatives leverage, and in 1918 Hara Takashi became the first commoner prime minister. Universal male suffrage followed in 1925, before military dominance hollowed out party government in the 1930s.
Postwar reform changed everything. Women first voted in the 1946 election, and the 1947 constitution renamed the parliament the National Diet, replaced the Peers with an elected upper house and made the cabinet answerable to the lower house. Within days of the first sitting, Tetsu Katayama became Japan's first socialist prime minister. From 1955 the newly formed Liberal Democratic Party governed for nearly 40 years until the 1993 election.
Source: House of Representatives (Japan)
