Odd candidates spice up Japanese national election

TOKYO, July 26 (Reuters) A fixed smile on his face, a middle-aged Japanese man dances to blaring '80s dance tunes on top of a van in Tokyo's bustling Shibuya district.

Passers-by look on quizzically.

But for Mac Akasaka, 58, a former businessman running in an election for parliament's upper house on Sunday without the backing of any major political party, the dancing is no joke.

''Low-profile candidates like me need some kind of twist to get attention from the public, otherwise nobody would listen to my speech no matter how hard I try,'' Akasaka told Reuters.

''So I started dancing before the speech.'' Resorting to wacky campaigns is not uncommon in Japan, where lesser-known candidates say a 50-year-old election law hampers efforts to get their messages across to the masses.

The law prohibits candidates from using visual images that can reach a large, unspecified number of people, and has been interpreted to ban campaigning on TV and on the Internet.

Akasaka has also grabbed voters' attention with his quirky ''smile therapy'' exercises, in which he massages the edges of his mouth higher with sweeping hands.

He advocates ''smile power'' to revive the Japanese people's hearts, and calls his one-man organisation the ''Smile Party''.

Another independent candidate is managing to win grins from voters, if not necessarily ballots, with his offbeat campaign.

Yoshiro Nakamatsu, the self-proclaimed inventor of the floppy disc and more than 3,000 other gadgets, is back campaigning after a failed bid for the Tokyo governorship in March.

In his campaign pledge, the 79-year-old Nakamatsu -- who calls himself ''Dr NakaMats'' -- boasts that his newly invented ''HOD'' technology for converting water into fuel for cars can help fight global warming.

His Web site says his aphrodisiac ''Love Jet'' perfume is guaranteed to turn around Japan's rock-bottom birth rate.

For most voters, such offbeat candidates are fun to watch, but not to put in office.

''Though their efforts should be respected, I don't think just blaring their names helps to boost their campaign,'' said Kiyokazu Anbiru, 42, who heads a charity.

REUTERS LPB BST1203