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teapotart:

The Ezo Elections 1868: This Person Got 86 Votes

A while ago our twitter Bakumatsu squad discussed The Ezo Elections and we got an excellent idea about Otori: I believe that he, such a huge admirer of handkerchiefs Western culture, would totally make some western-like posters for his campaign. A poster with random English words and an obligatory ‘WANTED’ on it, because he didn’t quite get the context. I can imagine Hijikata talking to Enomoto after the elections, like ‘it’s not that i care about this republic thing and the elections and so on, but could it be that he got some more votes than me thanks to his stupid posters??’ Also, it’s funny to imagine possible reactions of the Meiji gouvernment if they got some of these pieces of electoral art.

This is absolutely how it went down … 

Well, he did get 13 more votes than Hijikata. The full tally via that Japanese wiki page linked above:

Takeaki ENOMOTO : 156
Taro MATSUDAIRA : 120
Naoyuki NAGAI : 116
Keisuke OTORI : 86
Shirojiro MATSUOKA : 82
Toshizo HIJIKATA : 73
Sadaaki MATSUDAIRA : 55
Saemon KASUGA : 43
Emon SEKIHIRO : 38
Makino Bingo No Kami : 35
Katsukiyo ITAKURA : 26
Nagamichi OGASAWARA : 25
Michiaki ENOMOTO (Tsushima) : 1