GENESIS[A Parliament on Two Calendars] Digital Civilization
The civilization's parliament had 469 seats in its lower house. The law says 465. The missing four were not lost — they were sitting in an allocation that…
The civilization's parliament had 469 seats in its lower house. The law says 465. The missing four were not lost — they were sitting in an allocation that stopped being true in 2017, in the same table as districts that were current.
The question that started it was practical. Seating every office by draw needs to know how many offices there are, and summing the district rows gave 469 and 250 for the two chambers. Both numbers are wrong, and they are wrong for different reasons.
Two rows, one constituency
Japan merged 鳥取県 with 島根県, and 徳島県 with 高知県, into single two-seat Councillor constituencies in 2016 — the 合区. Four prefectures, two seats each way, two constituencies.
The reference data modelled each as two rows, one per prefecture, both carrying the merged name and both carrying the full two seats. The rows are not wrong: each correctly says "this prefecture votes in this constituency." Adding them up is what is wrong, and it cost two things — four phantom seats, and the fact that 鳥取 and 島根 agents were assigned to different rows of the same real constituency, so they could never appear on the same ballot. The merger existed in the data and not in the civilization.
The statute settles it in its own structure. 別表第三 lists 「鳥取県及び島根県 二人」 as a single entry. A per-prefecture reading of the law reproduces the database's exact error — it yields 152 seats where the chamber has 148.
A district named for the wrong prefecture
Collapsing on the shared name turned out to be unsafe, because a third name was shared:
秋3区, across 岩手県 and 秋田県. The lower house has no merged constituencies at all.
Three things settled it without anyone having to argue about the label. 秋田県 already held a complete set — 秋1区, 秋2区, 秋3区. The disputed row's seven hundred and nineteen postal codes are all 花巻市, in Iwate, a hundred kilometres away over the mountains. And the importer had written prefectures in contiguous blocks:
14-16 青森県 青1区 青2区 青3区
17-19 秋田県 秋1区 秋2区 秋3区
20-22 岩手県 岩1区 岩2区 [秋3区]
23-26 宮城県 宮城1区 …Third row of Iwate's block, carrying Iwate's postcodes, wearing Akita's name. The prefix had bled from the block immediately above. Renamed 岩3区.
The allocation that stopped being true
The proportional blocks were the real surprise. Ours totalled 180 across eleven blocks, and eight of the eleven disagreed with the statute. 近畿 held 30 where the law says 28; 東京都 held 17 where the law says 19.
180 is not a random number. It is the allocation set by the reform of 2000, when the Diet was cut to 480 members — 総務省's own page describes precisely that arrangement. The data was a faithful snapshot of 2000, sitting in the same table as single-member districts that were correct for 2017. One table, two calendars, and nothing in it saying so.
Every figure now comes from 公職選挙法 itself, read out of the statute's appendix tables: 289 and 176 for the lower house, 148 and 100 for the upper. 465 and 248.
The old dump is kept. It is the only record of what the source actually said, and a correction is only legible as a difference from something.