Japanese politicians struggle with online pitch On Friday afternoon, some 13,600 people were tuned into Suzuchan, the online video channel set up by Kan Suzuki, a Japanese politician campaigning to be returned to the upper house of the country's parliament in elections on Sunday. Mr Suzuki, a 49-year-old member of the struggling Democratic party of Japan, was not on screen at the time, being busy, presumably, with more traditional election-eve stumping. Instead, a supporter was interviewing a young woman about her experiences as a development worker in Africa. In the simple studio, decorated with election posters and pictures of Mr Suzuki with sports stars, the woman drew a picture of a stove she had helped procure for a Rwandan family and showed it to the webcam. I wanted to go overseas and help. I went right after university," she said. Suzuchan has been on the web since 2001, but this is the first time that Mr Suzuki has been able to broadcast during an election campaign. Online communication with voters had been effectively banned in Japan until a revision of its strict election law this year. Now politicians of all parties have taken to Facebook, Twitter and the Japanese webcasting service Niconico, which hosts Mr Suzuki's channel. The new digital politics has got off to a slow start. In a survey by The Yomiuri Shimbun, Japan's biggest newspaper by circulation, only 16 per cent of respondents said they were using the internet to help them decide who to vote for. An online debate aimed at voters in their 20s that was broadcast this week by Niconico attracted 42,000 viewers, much fewer than the service, which has 34m registered users, had been hoping for. Getting young people interested in politics is a major goal of the liberalisation. Japanese in their 20s cast ballots less than half as often those in their 60s, one reason why overall voter turnout has declined in cent years. The ruling Liberal Democratic party had long been accused of opposing internet campaigning for fear that it would undercut its conventional vote-getting machine, but now it is putting resources into its online appeal. The party, which is expected to win a big victory on Sunday in tandem with its coalition partner Komeito, has distributed iPad minis to all its 78 candidates in hopes of making them more internet-savvy. It has also developed a smartphone game, "Abe-pyon" - "jumping Abe" - featuring a leaping cartoon version of Shinzo Abe, the party leader and prime minister. On the whole, however, most politicians" Tweets, Facebook updates and so forth have been limited to stock messages and scheduling details posted by staff. It is a one-way flow of information that many complain differs little from that heard on television or from the blaring speaker vans that have long been the mainstay of Japanese campaigning. On Wednesday, after a stop near the disputed Senkaku islands that included a photo op with members of the coast guard, Mr Abe told his 375,000 Facebook followers: "My head bows to the work of those who are protecting our country's territorial land, sea and air on the front lines, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year." More than anything, the lack of online sizzle may reflect apathy about the election itself. Voter turnout for the lower-house election that brought Mr Abe to power in December was a historically low 59 per cent. Because the upper house is less powerful and polls suggest a win for the LDP is assured, turnout on Sunday is projected to be even weaker, perhaps less than 50 per cent. "Interest is very low," says Koichi Nakano, a political scientist at Sophia University in Tokyo, who calculates that poor turnout is a boon for the LDP, more of whose supporters are older and therefore more likely to vote. The party, he says, received more votes when it lost power in 2009, in an election that excited the electorate and drew more voters than usual to the polls, than when it won back power in the low-turnout contest last year. On Suzuchan, the young aid worker is proving the point. "To be honest, I'm not really that interested," she says when asked about her view of the election. I mean: Will things really change?