Ōsaka 12th district (大阪12区 Ōsaka jūni-ku) is a single-member electoral district for theHouse of Representatives, the lower house of theNational Diet of Japan. It is located in North-easternOsaka and covers the cities ofNeyagawa,Daitō andShijōnawate. As of September 2012, 342,226 voters were registered in this district, giving its voters a slight above average vote weight.[1]
The most recent representative from this district wasLDP'sTomokatsu Kitagawa, the son of pre-reform three-member7th district LDP RepresentativeIshimatsu Kitagawa. In 2012, he was one of only three Liberal Democrats in Osaka to win a district seat. He first won the seat in the "postal privatization" election of 2005. The first incumbent wasDemocratShinji Tarutoko who was elected to the House of Representatives in 1993 in the 7th district for theJapan New Party. After the electoral reform, he won the new single-member 12th district three times in a row before losing it to Kitagawa in 2005. In the landslide Democratic victory of 2009, Tarutoko regained the 12th district by a solid margin. He founded his own faction (Tarutoko group, officially: Seizankai) in 2010. Tarutoko ran for the DPJ presidency in 2010, became DPJ vice-secretary-general in 2011 and a minister of state in the Noda Cabinet in 2012. In 2012, he finished third behind Kitagawa andYour Party's Ryōma Ishii. Kitagawa died mid-term on 26 December 2018,[2] triggering aby-election in April 2019. Kitagawa's nephew, Shinpei Kitagawa, ran in 2019 and 2021 but lost both times toIshin candidateFumitake Fujita.