House of Councillors The is the upper house of the National Diet of Japan. The House of Representatives is the lower house. The House of Councillors is the successor to the pre-war House of Peers. If the two houses disagree on matters of the budget, treaties, ...

elections were held in

Japan Japan ( ja, 日本, or , and formally , ''Nihonkoku'') is an island country in East Asia. It is situated in the northwest Pacific Ocean, and is bordered on the west by the Sea of Japan, while extending from the Sea of Okhotsk in the north ...

on 1 July 1962,Table 13: Persons Elected and Votes Polled by Political Parties - Ordinary Elections for the House of Councillors (1947–2004)

Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications The is a cabinet-level ministry in the Government of Japan. Its English name was Ministry of Public Management, Home Affairs, Posts and Telecommunications (MPHPT) prior to 2004. It is housed in the 2nd Building of the Central Common Government Of ...

electing half the seats in the House. The Liberal Democratic Party won the most seats. This was the first Japanese national election to feature the

Kōmeitō , formerly New Komeito and abbreviated NKP, is a conservative political party in Japan founded by lay members of the Buddhist Japanese new religious movement Soka Gakkai in 1964. Since 2012, it has served in government as the junior coalitio ...

as a candidate, as it had formed earlier in the same year. As is typical for House of Councillors elections, candidate personality and public appeal played a stronger role than they would in a House of Representatives election; the first place winner for the national district voting was Aki Fujiwara, a panelist on the Japanese version of

I've Got a Secret ''I've Got a Secret'' is an American panel game show produced by Mark Goodson and Bill Todman for CBS television. Created by comedy writers Allan Sherman and Howard Merrill, it was a derivative of Goodson-Todman's own panel show, ''What's My Line ...

, who broke all of the previous House of Councillors records by obtaining 1,160,000 votes. The

Japan Socialist Party The was a socialist and progressive political party in Japan that existed from 1945 to 1996. The party was founded as the Social Democratic Party of Japan by members of several proletarian parties that existed before World War II, including ...

(JSP) had attempted to make questions of constitutional revision the main issue for the election, whereas the LDP attempted to sideline the issue by claiming that it would not pursue any constitutional amendments unless it were to receive recommendations from the Constitutional Investigation Commission, which was still in the process of deliberating at the time of the election. Overall, the JSP lost the most in this election, losing 19 seats, whereas the LDP gained 10 seats.

Results

By constituency

References

{{Japanese elections

House of Councillors (Japan) elections 1962 elections in Japan July 1962 events in Asia Election and referendum articles with incomplete results