The Japanese Supreme Court and the equality of the vote: a careful activism

Since the 1995 electoral reform, the Japanese Supreme Court had addressed the issue of malapportionment with a more stringent approach than in the past. The Court has actively upheld the one-man, one-vote principle, though never indicated a clear standard of constitutionality in term of permissible deviation. In doing so, the Court respected the discretion of the Diet in the shaping of representation and in the realization the one-man, one-vote principle. Nonetheless, the Court set as limit to that discretion the rational basis for the deviation. Furthermore, according to the Court, in order to assure a proper representation, the Diet has also to consider that the function of MPs is to represent the nation as a whole. However, despite having ruled some recent elections to be in a state of unconstitutionality because of the lack of rationale, the Court never invalidated them, continuing preferring to urge the Diet to redress the imbalance.