ABSTRACT
Japan has developed a system for drawing the boundaries of election districts that coincides with the preferences of individual politicians, making the use of the system much more likely. The Japanese use a variety of local boundaries that reduce to a minimum the discretion of those who draw the lines of the election districts. With discretion so reduced it becomes impossible to draw the boundaries to advantage a political party (gerrymander). Giving weight, however, to several types of local administrative boundaries does make the population of election districts differ some (malapportionment), but this difference is no more than what regularly occurs among the districts of different states and provinces in a country.
