Osaka's Ohta wins second term

OSAKA (Kyodo) Gov. Fusae Ohta won a second four-year term in Sunday's gubernatorial election in Osaka, beating four rivals in the nation's second-most populous prefecture, according to early returns and a Kyodo News exit poll.

Osaka Gov. Fusae Ohta is in high spirits after hearing the early returns in her re-election bid in Osaka.

Elected in 2000 as Japan's first female governor, the 52-year-old Ohta cruised to victory with a host of parties backing her.

She had support from the Liberal Democratic Party and New Komeito, as well as the Democratic Party of Japan and the Social Democratic Party.

Her four challengers were Takenori Emoto, 56, a former star professional baseball pitcher who was later elected to the House of Councilors; the Japanese Communist Party-backed lawyer Shoji Umeda, 53; Shigezo Nishimura, 74, a former business manager; and Hiroaki Koyama, 61, a former member of the city assembly of Sennan, Osaka Prefecture.

All five candidates ran as independents in the race.

Ohta, a former bureaucrat in the old Ministry of International Trade and Industry, faces a host of tough problems for her second term to achieve her policy of seeing "the flower of Osaka's revival bloom."

These include the prefecture's finances, among the worst in the country, and the prolonged slump in the local economy.

The election basically came down to a race between Ohta, Emoto and Umeda. Some LDP members in the prefectural assembly supported Emoto, widely known in the region as a former ace pitcher for the Hanshin Tigers.

But Ohta apparently outdid her rivals by gaining broad support from women voters and solid block votes from supporters of New Komeito and the Osaka group of the Japanese Trade Union Confederation, the exit poll showed.

Ohta garnered 64 percent of the votes cast by women and 51 percent of the votes cast by men, according to the exit poll of 1,520 voters. She had a 93 percent support rate among New Komeito backers and 75 percent among LDP supporters.

Emoto enjoyed a baseball fever tail wind in Osaka as the Hanshin Tigers won the Central League pennant last season.

He failed however to pick up unaffiliated voters despite calling for more emphasis on citizens' voices instead of the bureaucrat-led government and criticizing Ohta for drawing support from major political parties, business circles and labor unions.

According to the exit poll, Emoto's support from unaffiliated voters and DPJ supporters came in at only the 30 percent level, while 15 percent of women and 31 percent of men said they voted for him.

Umeda could not attract votes outside communist supporters for his campaign pledge of shifting policy focus to welfare, medical and education services from such large development projects as expansion work on Kansai International Airport.