Kagoshima 1st District (鹿児島県第1区, Kagoshima-ken dai-i-ku) is a single-member electoral district of the
House of Representatives the lower house of the Diet of Japan. The district is in
Kagoshima Prefecture and covers most of the prefectural capital the city of
Kagoshima (a small part of the city is in the
Kagoshima 2nd district) and includes
Kagoshima District which covers several small islands south of
Kyushu. In of 2021 the district had 358,559 eligible voters.[2]
The district was created following the
1994 Japanese electoral reform. From the first elections in 1996 until 2009, the Representative was
Okiharu Yasuoka who was first elected to the Diet in 1972 and was for a long time a Representative for an electoral district that covered the
Amami Islands.
In the
DPJ victory in the
2009 elections the district was won by democrat
Hiroshi Kawauchi, but Yasuoka won the district back in 2012.
Yasuoka retired for health reasons in 2017 and his son
Hirotake Yasuoka ran for his seat in 2017 but lost to Kawauchi. In 2021 Hirotake Yasuoka was put on a safe spot in the
Kyushu proportional representation block, where he gained a seat in the Diet, and was replaced by
Takuma Miyaji as the LDP candidate.[3] Miyaji won the seat back in the 2021 election. Miyaji is the son of
Kazuaki Miyaji, former Representative of the
Kagoshima 3rd district and had first gained seat in the Diet in 2017 in the Kyushu PR block.
^"総務省|令和4年9月1日現在選挙人名簿及び在外選挙人名簿登録者数" [Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications - Number of registered voters as of 1 September 2022] (in Japanese). Retrieved 2023-01-04.