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Yahoo! My Yahoo! Mail More Yahoo! Services Account Options New User? Sign Up Sign In Help Yahoo! Search web search Home Singapore Asia Pacific World Business Entertainment Sports Technology Twitter forbidden for Japanese campaigns AFP - Saturday, July 10 Send IM Story Print Twitter forbidden for Japanese campaigns TOKYO (AFP) - – Japan may have recently set a world record for tweets per second, but when it comes to electioneering the nation's politicians are still restricted to 20th century megaphones and handing out pamphlets. Use of micro-blogging sites such as Twitter or even emails for campaigning is forbidden in Japan, forcing candidates for Sunday's upper house vote to use old-fashioned and noisy bullhorns and pavement-pounding to reach voters. US President Barack Obama's use of the Internet helped send him to the White House but lawmakers in Japan have been slower to embrace the web, leaving many young voters feeling disconnected from the political process. And candidates are constrained by regulations banning them from tweeting -- or to "mumble" in the Japanese translation -- on Twitter, blogging, sharing policies by email or posting videos online during election campaigns. "Without the Internet, we cannot deliver our message to voters," said Mito Kakizawa, a lawmaker with the recently formed opposition Your Party. "The Internet is an essential tool for small parties like our party, which does not have big regional organisations," said Kakizawa, himself a former volunteer on Obama's presidential election campaign in the United States. It's an ironic scenario for a wired nation whose fervour for new technology saw it set a record 3,283 tweets per second after the country's football team beat Denmark at the World Cup, according to Twitter numbers. Japan has become one of the site's biggest and fastest growing markets since its domestic launch in 2008, with the proportion of Internet users who tweet surpassing that of the United States earlier this year, NetRatings Japan said. The research company said that the number of Twitter users in Japan has increased nearly 20 times in the space of a year, from 496,000 in May 2009 to 9,157,000 twelve months later. Some say its popularity is because the 140 characters permitted per "mumble" can convey more in Japanese characters than in the traditional Western alphabet, appropriate for the home of three-line haiku poetry. "Twitter is an important tool that should be used to send political messages," said Kiyoshi Abe, professor of sociology at Kwansei Gakuin University. Despite the restrictions, "it will maintain its own position in Japan's web community." Critics say failure to reform the restrictions -- which supposedly preserve a level playing field for competing candidates -- is a huge missed opportunity for an electoral process they say is geared towards incumbents. "Old style politicians fear the Internet," said Ichita Yamamoto, of the main opposition Liberal Democratic Party. "They are afraid that opening up various new tools would lead to their disadvantage." Yet outside of elections the service has won popularity among politicians, including former prime minister Yukio Hatoyama, who has amassed more than 672,000 followers since he opened his account in January. Dubbed the "alien" for his offbeat quirks, Hatoyama tweeted during office and turned to the service hours after stepping down as leader of the ruling Democratic Party of Japan, saying he could now tweet with freedom. His party originally vowed to overhaul the campaign law but efforts to do so ran aground amid the political upheaval that followed Hatoyama's June resignation. Experts say the Japanese parliament should step up efforts to remove the web restriction for future contests. "Politics cannot be an exception in this era of the Internet," said Tsutomu Kanayama, professor of mass communications at Ritsumeikan University in Kyoto. "Japanese politics must be allowed to continue on its path from analogue to digital." 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