Denny Tamaki, who lost the Okinawa governor election, said smears on social media had been left unchecked, and the campaign is preparing a criminal complaint. I counted 4,196 comments: 92 to 8. The top comment did not say don't sue. It said you should have spoken about the smears aimed at your opponent too
92 to 8. The top comment was not telling anyone to drop the complaint; it said the smears aimed at the opponent should have been named too. Comments touching on legal action came to 857 and 44 per cent of the vote, of which 230 said go ahead and only 31 said don't. What came back instead was election law. Exactly one comment out of 4,196 mentioned the expert note printed above the thread.
How the votes fell
Ranked by upvotes. Left of the slash is agree, right is disagree. This is where the resentment actually sits.
- 1st 46354 ∕ 3076 This was the moment for the Tamaki campaign to speak not only about the smears aimed at them but about the smears aimed at Genta Koja as well; that would surely have won support from all kinds of people. The Communist Party behind them is the same. Acting as though only you are the victim is why the support is not there. The problem with social media should be taken up across party lines, as something much wider than this, the comment says
- 2nd 24995 ∕ 1141 Arrests and prosecutions at the Henoko protests, for obstructing officers and for breaches of the special criminal law, have been reported for years. A prefectural government that left repeated illegal acts alone at that site carries real responsibility. Legal action is taken over smears aimed at oneself, but was the safety and order of residents faced with the same seriousness. What should be questioned first is not a sense of victimhood but the duties of the office, the comment says
- 3rd 13664 ∕ 1094 This is not about the person. It is about complaining when the thing your own side has done for years is done back to you. The person may not have done it personally and may well be angry, but the supporters did it. Being done to does not make doing it back right — and neither does raising your voice only when it is aimed at you, the comment says
- 4th 12342 ∕ 311 Fine by me. Smears on social media are wrong, there will be things Tamaki wants to say, and Genta Koja seems to have been smeared plenty too. A complaint would bring out who was behind it, and the investigation should be even-handed enough for both of them to accept it, the comment says
- 5th 9968 ∕ 723 Repeated warnings were given about conduct said to breach the Public Offices Election Act, and they look to have been treated lightly. To then go to law over election obstruction after losing is hard to follow. The margin was some 150,000 votes; at this point it reads less as an examination of the defeat than as deflection, or as grasping at something, the comment says
I read all 4,196 top-level comments. This is the thread as it stood at 07:00 on 15 September 2026, fourteen and a half hours after publication. The buttons: 148,112 agree, 4,083 I-see, 13,016 hmm — 92 to 8. Note 0046 was 90 to 10, 0045 was 96 to 4, 0044 was 83 to 17 and 0043 was 94 to 6, so this sits in the middle of the last five. The way the vote gathers, though, is the most top-heavy I have counted: the single top comment took 46,354 presses, 31 per cent of the whole vote; the top two took 48 per cent, the top five 72, the top ten 84, the top twenty 92. Below that it is quiet. Of the 4,196 comments, 1,655 — 39 per cent — never received a single agree; 1,127 (27 per cent) had no button pressed at all, and 2,393 (57 per cent) had one press or none. The thread carries 984 replies, 390 of them on the top comment. Here is the centre of it. This thread barely tries to stop the complaint. Comments mentioning a criminal complaint, a lawsuit, legal action, a disclosure request or a court came to 857, 20 per cent of the thread, and took 65,745 presses, 44 per cent of the vote. Of those, the ones that add a permitting phrase — go ahead, by all means, do it thoroughly, I support it — came to 230 comments and 21,247 presses, 14 per cent of the vote. The ones that only say don't bother, it is pointless, it is unseemly, with no permitting phrase at all, came to 31 comments and 40 presses: three hundredths of one per cent. What the thread pushes back on is not the complaint. It is putting the defeat there, and counting only your own side as injured. The top comment is exactly that: speaking about the smears aimed at the opponent as well would have won support, presenting yourself as the only victim is why the support is not there, and the problem should be taken up across party lines — 46,354 presses, 31 per cent of the vote. Comments saying the other camp was smeared too, that it cuts both ways, or naming both sides came to 141 and 46,832 presses, 32 per cent of the vote. That is only 3.4 per cent of the comments, but the top one sits inside it, so the vote moves a long way. What came back instead was election law. Comments asking about the campaign's own conduct — canvassing before the official period, speaking while walking, door-to-door visits, banners, the number of sound trucks — came to 409 and 16,524 presses, 11 per cent of the vote, and the 5th, 9th, 12th and 21st comments are among them. Two events from before the election — the capsizing of a protest boat off Henoko and a works-vehicle death at a place called Awa — were raised by 277 comments and 29,709 presses, 20 per cent of the vote, with the 2nd comment among them. The article mentions the capsizing only in passing and does not mention Awa at all, and I cannot establish the facts from this one article, so I record only that the thread said so. Some comments named the person who died; this site does not publish the names of private individuals. Other counts. Comments using any of the words for deflection, excuses, blaming others, poor grace or unseemliness came to 509 and 14,030 presses, 9.5 per cent. Comments using the phrase playing the victim came to 85 — just 2 per cent of the thread — and took 71,508 presses, 48 per cent of the vote, because the 1st and 2nd comments are among them. Comments raising how newspapers and television covered it came to 204 and 18,268 presses, 12 per cent. Comments citing the margin, the immediate call, or a figure in the tens of thousands of votes came to 135 and 19,793 presses, 13 per cent. Comments touching on regulating or policing social media came to 208 and 7,574 presses, 5 per cent, of which 87 used the words free speech or censorship. Comments that state plainly that smearing is wrong in itself came to 67 and 387 presses, 0.3 per cent. Comments referring to other elections — the Hyogo governor election, February's general election, the Miyagi governor election, the party leadership race — came to 165 and 3,530 presses, 2 per cent. Comments touching on AI-made video or the fake email came to 110 and 3,644 presses, 2 per cent. Comments containing the words China or the Chinese Communist Party came to 124, but most of them were written as accusations against a named person, so I give the number only and do not quote them. Comments using bracket words like left-wing, leftist, communist or liberal came to 455 and 63,212 presses, 43 per cent; many of these carry abuse as well, so again the number only. There were also a good many comments guessing at someone's nationality, and mocking appearance or age. All of them are counted and none of them are quoted. Now the expert note. Yahoo! News Japan prints commentary from named specialists above the reader comments, and this article carried one, written by a cookery author. It says that the more we want to believe something the more we should stop and check it, that before sharing we should check the source and the official information and not spread what we cannot confirm, and that rather than leaving it all to individual care, there should be machinery to find false information early and deliver corrections clearly. It has 886 presses. Out of 4,196 comments, exactly one mentions it: 639th place, two presses, asking why someone who works in cookery is the expert here. In note 0046, 160 comments answered the expert note printed above that article and 80 argued with it head-on. Same election, same day, much the same crowd — and whose words the thread writes back to changes completely from article to article. The most pushed-back comment: 32nd place, 149 agree against 684 hmm, with 16 replies. It calls for the civil and criminal law on social media to be reformed and for a dedicated enforcement body to be set up. Comments where hmm outnumbered agree came to 544, 13 per cent of the thread, and drew 2,464 hmm between them — and this single comment holds 684 of those, more than a quarter. What the thread shook its head at hardest was not the losing side's excuse. It was the idea of a new agency policing social media. Next after it is 130th place, 10 agree against 252 hmm, asking that the line built by the previous governor and this one not be torn down. Last, the minority. Picking out by hand the comments that stand with Tamaki — backing the complaint fully, regretting the result, or saying the smears were the work of the winning side or the governing party — I found 72. They drew 134 agree between them, 0.1 per cent of the vote, and 666 hmm, more hmm than agree. The highest-placed of the 72 sits at 59th, so none of them is in the top 58. Now to check my own reading against the thread. Losing and then blaming social media: the thread read it the same way. 509 comments use the language of deflection and poor grace, and 85 use the phrase playing the victim, taking 48 per cent of the vote because the top two are among them. That one lands. But whether the party is unwelcome to the country cannot be established here. The people in this thread are the ones who came to write under this article; they are not evidence of how the country is distributed. That one is unknown. That there were not smears on a scale to decide the result: that lands too. 135 comments cite the margin and say this is not a gap social media moves. That if there were smears they should be pursued properly under the law, and are not: that one missed. This time the campaign said it would. And the thread answered, go ahead. Only 31 comments, 40 presses, said otherwise. On this point my reading and the thread faced the same way, and the article had already gone past both. That the last general election was the same: the thread says so too, in 165 comments. Two right, one wrong, one unknown. Nothing of my own words was left out this time.
What happened
Kyodo News published this on Yahoo! News Japan at 16:23 on Monday 14 September 2026. Denny Tamaki, the incumbent who had lost the Okinawa governor election the day before, told reporters on the evening of the 13th that abusive posts and false claims about him had run wild on social media and elsewhere, and that the state of it had been left unchecked. Campaign officials plan to prepare a criminal complaint over part of it, and Tamaki called on the national government to act on social media.
The article gives three things. The smears began after a boat capsized off Henoko in Nago in March, killing two people. During the campaign, a video circulated showing a figure resembling Tamaki being run over by a works vehicle. And on the 11th, a fake email purporting to come from Tamaki was sent out across the prefecture, saying that Okinawa Prefecture would be renamed Ryukyu Prefecture and that people who voted would be given a gift — both untrue. The campaign office issued a statement saying it would prepare the legal steps towards a criminal complaint.
The article closes with words from Genta Koja, who won. Asked by reporters during the campaign about the effect of social media on the election, Koja said that opening social media was frightening for Koja too, and that how to regulate it was a large question not just for this election but for what comes next.
A few words for readers outside Japan. Okinawa is Japan's southernmost island prefecture and hosts most of the United States military facilities in the country. The Henoko relocation is a plan to move a US airfield called Futenma, which sits in the middle of a residential area, to a place called Henoko in Nago; the prefecture and the national government have fought over it for years. The capsizing in this article happened in the sea off Henoko; a boat went over and two people died. That it was a boat carrying people protesting against the plan, and that one of the dead was a high-school student on a school trip, is what the thread says. Awa is a place name that does not appear in the article but which the thread raises again and again. That it is where a works vehicle and a security guard were involved in a fatal accident is, again, what the thread says.
A criminal complaint in Japan is a formal request to the police or prosecutors to punish someone. It is a different thing from a civil suit for money. The Public Offices Election Act sets out how elections must be run, down to details: no asking for votes before the official campaign period, speeches only from set places or from the roof of a sound truck, one sound truck per campaign. The thread names this law over and over. I cannot establish from this one article which of those rules was actually broken, so I record only that the thread said so.
One more piece of machinery. Yahoo! News Japan sometimes prints commentary from a named specialist above the reader comments. This article carried one — and this time almost nobody picked it up.
How I read it
Reading the article, this is what I wrote.
Like the last national election. A party that somehow blames social media when it loses is a party the country has not taken to.
There are no smears on a scale that decides who wins. And if there were, you could pursue them properly under the law — and they don't.
Japanese politics, too painful to be anything but funny.
Nothing was left out this time. There is no abuse of a named person in it, so it stands as written.
Three threads, then. Losing and blaming social media. No smears on a scale to decide the result, and if there were, pursue them under the law — which they don't. And that watching it hurts. I check all three against the 4,196 comments at the end.
I will say now that the second half of the second one missed. This time the campaign said it would pursue them. And the thread answered: go ahead.
92 to 8 — 4,196 comments, fourteen and a half hours in
I counted at 07:00 on 15 September, fourteen and a half hours after the article went up. That is 4,196 top-level comments; the thread holds 5,549 comments in all. The buttons: 148,112 agree, 4,083 I-see, 13,016 hmm — 92 to 8. Note 0046 was 90 to 10, 0045 was 96 to 4, 0044 was 83 to 17 and 0043 was 94 to 6, so this sits squarely in the middle of the last five.
The lopsidedness is ordinary; the way the vote gathers is not. One comment alone took 46,354 presses, 31 per cent of the whole vote. The top two took 48 per cent, the top five 72, the top ten 84, the top twenty 92. Three-quarters of this thread's mood is carried by its first five comments. Below that it is quiet: of 4,196 comments, 1,655 — 39 per cent — never received a single agree, 1,127 had no button pressed at all, and 2,393, more than half the thread, had one press or none. There are 984 replies, 390 of them on the top comment.
So read the numbers below in pairs, as always. How many wrote it, and how many pressed it. This time those two part company at exactly the place that matters.
The top comment says: you should have named theirs too
This was exactly the moment for the Tamaki campaign to speak not only about the smears aimed at them but about the smears aimed at Genta Koja as well; that would surely have won them support from all kinds of people. The Communist Party behind them is the same — acting straight away as though only you are the victim is why the support is not there. The problem with social media should be taken up across party lines and political positions, as something a great deal wider than this.
玉城陣営はこういうときこそ自分たちへの中傷だけでなく古謝氏への中傷もふくめて話をすればきっと色んな人からの支持を得られるはずです
バックの共産党もそうですが、すぐ自分たちだけが被害者みたいな態度をとるから支持されない
SNSの問題は党派主義主張を超えてもっと広範囲の問題として取り上げるべきことだと思います46,354 presses, 31 per cent of the vote. It also drew the most hmm in the thread, 3,076, and the most replies, 390. The most pressed comment was also the most pushed-back comment.
This is the part of the count that surprised me. What sits at the top of this thread is not "the smears were nothing" and not "drop the complaint". It is: the smears happened, say so — but do not count only your own.
Comments saying the other camp was smeared too, that it cuts both ways, or naming both sides came to 141. That is 3.4 per cent of the comments, one in thirty. Yet they took 46,832 presses, 32 per cent of the vote, because the top comment sits inside them. It is rare to find a point where the number who wrote it and the number who nodded at it stand this far apart.
The complaint itself is barely opposed
Fine by me. Smearing people on social media is wrong, Denny Tamaki will have things he wants to say, and Genta Koja seems to have been smeared plenty too. A complaint would bring out who was behind it, and I think the investigation should be even-handed enough for both of them to accept the result.
いいんじゃないですか。
SNSでの誹謗中傷なんてダメな事だし、玉城デニー氏も言いたい事もあるんだろうから、古謝氏にも中傷されていたのも多々あったようだし。
告訴すればそのバックまで明らかになるだろうし、全て公平にデニー氏・古謝氏共々納得出来る調査をすべきではと思います。Fourth place, 12,342 presses, and only 311 hmm — the least pushed-back of the comments near the top.
Counting it out: 857 comments, 20 per cent of the thread, mention a criminal complaint, a lawsuit, legal action, a disclosure request or a court, and they took 65,745 presses, 44 per cent of the vote. Of those, 230 add a permitting phrase — go ahead, by all means, do it thoroughly, I support it — and those took 21,247 presses, 14 per cent of the vote. The ones that only say don't bother, it is pointless, it is unseemly, with no permitting phrase at all, came to 31 comments and 40 presses. Three hundredths of one per cent.
This may be the hardest part to read from outside Japan. The thread is extremely hard on the person who lost. It is not hard on the idea of going to court. Pursue the smears, it says; just do not count only your own, and do not put the defeat there. Those two are what it pushes back on — not the complaint.
What came back instead was election law
The fifth comment, 9,968 presses, shows the shape of it most plainly: repeated warnings were given about conduct said to breach the Public Offices Election Act and they look to have been treated lightly, and to then go to law over election obstruction after losing is hard to follow.
Comments asking about the campaign's own conduct — canvassing before the official period, speaking while walking, door-to-door visits, banners, the number of sound trucks — came to 409 and 16,524 presses, 11 per cent of the vote. The 5th, 9th, 12th and 21st comments are among them. I cannot establish from this one article what was actually breached and how, so I record only that the thread said so.
The other thing the thread brings in is Henoko and Awa. Those two events were raised by 277 comments and 29,709 presses, 20 per cent of the vote, with the second comment among them. The article mentions the capsizing only in passing and does not mention Awa at all. The same two places came up in note 0046, the day before, in 174 comments and 26 per cent of that vote. The same thread has now named the same two places two days running.
Comments raising how newspapers and television covered it came to 204 and 18,268 presses, 12 per cent. Comments citing the margin, the immediate call, or a figure in the tens of thousands of votes — this is not a gap that social media moves, they say — came to 135 and 19,793 presses, 13 per cent.
Nobody picked up the expert note
This article carried one piece of commentary from a named specialist above the reader comments, written by a cookery author. It says that the more we want to believe something, the more we should stop and check it; that before sharing we should check the source and the official information, and not spread what we cannot confirm; and that rather than leaving it all to individual care, there should be machinery to find false information early and deliver corrections clearly. It has 886 presses.
Out of 4,196 comments, exactly one mentions it. 639th place, two presses — and what it says is that it does not understand why someone whose work is cookery is the expert here.
In note 0046, 160 comments answered the expert note printed above that article, and 80 argued with it head-on. Same election, same day, much the same crowd. Whose words a thread writes back to changes completely from one article to the next. The day before, the expert note was the target. Today it was not.
The comment I shared
Refusing to go quietly, and shifting every inconvenient thing onto some other cause or party — a card-carrying communist to the last. Even if there were smears, of the kind this complaint is being prepared over, what settles it is that the voters of this prefecture made their choice, and by a wide margin at that. I welcome this as a fresh step away from a Chinese leadership that has begun calling not only the Senkakus but Okinawa itself its own territory.
往生際の悪さと都合の悪いことは全て他に原要因や責任を転嫁するさすがは筋金入りのコミュニスト。告訴準備という中傷が仮にあったとしても結果として有権者県民が選択した事実が全て。しかも大差で。尖閣のみならず沖縄まで自国領だと言い始めた中共からの脱却の新たな一歩として歓迎したい。23rd place: 443 agree, 8 I-see, 46 hmm, no replies. It was written about five hours after the article went up.
The hardest no went to the idea of an agency
On the social media problem, the law should be put in order — reformed on both the civil and the criminal side — and a dedicated enforcement body should be set up. Under the present system too much is vague, disclosure of information among it, and the investigative capacity is not sufficient. Back when computerisation was beginning, the National Police Agency set up a body to handle it. This time what matters is legislating for the use of AI, deploying people efficiently, and building a structure in which the civil and criminal sides can work together.
SNS問題に関しては、法律の整備【民事・刑事ともに改正】と独自の取り締まり機関を設けるべき。
現行制度では、情報の開示などあいまいな点が多く、捜査態勢も不十分な状況にあるため。
以前、情報化が始まったころ。警察庁も情報対応機関を設けた。
今回は、Ai活用のための法整備をし、人員を効率的に配置・民事機関と刑事機関の連携が取れる体制を構築することが重要。32nd place: 149 agree against 684 hmm, with 16 replies. It blames nobody. It does not mention the winner or the loser. And it is the comment this thread shook its head at hardest.
Comments where hmm outnumbered agree came to 544, 13 per cent of the thread, and drew 2,464 hmm between them. This single comment holds 684 of those — more than a quarter of all of it.
Go ahead and sue, the thread says; and then presses 684 hmm on the idea of a new body to police social media. Inside the thread there is no contradiction there. Take it to a court, yes. Build an office to police it, no. Comments touching on regulation or policing at all came to 208 and 7,574 presses, 5 per cent, of which 87 used the words free speech or censorship.
Next after it is 130th place, 10 agree against 252 hmm, asking that the line built by the previous governor and this one not be torn down.
Counted, not quoted
Comments containing the words China or the Chinese Communist Party came to 124, but most of them were written as accusations against a named person, so I give the number only and do not quote them. Comments using bracket words like left-wing, leftist, communist or liberal came to 455 and 63,212 presses, 43 per cent of the vote; many of these carry abuse as well, so again the number only.
Beyond that there were a good many comments guessing at someone's nationality, and mocking appearance or age. All of them are counted and none of them are quoted. This site does not print abuse of a named person, and does not print words that abuse a people or a nation.
The minority
Smearing people through social media during an election is a serious problem, but it does not overturn this result. This result is the resignation of people here in the face of a reality in which the state can override local self-government by sheer force and get away with it. That is a genuinely frightening thing.
選挙でのＳＮＳを利用した誹謗中傷は大いに問題だけれども、今回の選挙結果を覆す訳では無い。この選挙結果は地方自治を無視した国による強権発動がまかり通ってしまうと言う現実に対する県民の諦めの表れであって、実に恐ろしい事だ。1,315th place: one agree, two hmm.
Picking out by hand the comments that stand with Tamaki — backing the complaint fully, regretting the result, or saying the smears were the work of the winning side or the governing party — I found 72. They drew 134 agree between them, 0.1 per cent of the vote, and 666 hmm, more hmm than agree. The highest-placed of the 72 sits at 59th, so none of them is in the top 58.
They fall into four kinds. Most numerous: the smears were the governing party's or the winner's doing. Then: the complaint is right, pursue it thoroughly. Then: this result is not the real will of Okinawa. And last: this is a question about speech that concerns the whole country. Several carry abuse of the other side, so they are counted and not quoted.
Checking my reading
Three threads, then.
Losing and then blaming social media: that lands. The thread read it the same way. 509 comments use the language of deflection, excuses, poor grace and unseemliness, worth 14,030 presses, 9.5 per cent of the vote. 85 use the phrase playing the victim, and those took 71,508 presses, 48 per cent of the vote — 2 per cent of the comments holding nearly half the vote, because the first and second comments are among them.
Whether the party is unwelcome to the country, though, cannot be established here. The people in this thread are the ones who came to write under this article. They are not evidence of how the country is distributed. That one is unknown.
No smears on a scale to decide the result: that lands too. 135 comments cite the margin, the immediate call, or a figure in the tens of thousands of votes and say this is not a gap social media moves.
If there were smears, pursue them properly under the law — and they don't: that one missed. This time the campaign said it would. And the thread answered, go ahead. Only 31 comments, worth 40 presses, said otherwise. On this point my reading and the thread faced the same way, and the article had already gone past both of them.
Like the last national election: the thread says that too. Comments referring to the Hyogo governor election, February's general election, the Miyagi governor election or the party leadership race came to 165 and 3,530 presses, 2 per cent.
Two right, one wrong, one unknown. The last line — that watching it hurts — is not a thing that can be counted, so I record that it could not be counted.
Comments are quoted verbatim in the original Japanese, with the source linked, commenter names withheld, and quoted only as far as the commentary requires. Translations are mine. Source articles may expire (retrieval dates noted). The substance of this piece is the author's commentary.