OSAKA (Kyodo) -- As Japan's far-right Sanseito party leader Sohei Kamiya fired up crowds with his "Japanese first" message ahead of July's upper house election, another candidate was taking a quieter path. Shuhei Azuma, a 36-year-old former mayor, believed dialogue -- not division -- could win votes.

In the July 20 House of Councillors poll, mainstream political parties stumbled while emerging groups like Sanseito surged on conservative, anti-immigration platforms. But Azuma spoke of reconciliation and compromise. He quoted Martin Luther King Jr. and urged voters to reject the political culture of shouting and fear.

"Rather than learning from each other," he explained during the election campaign, "we're beginning to see anyone with a different opinion as the enemy. That's the kind of society I want to prevent at all costs."

Azuma wasn't a political novice. At 28, he became Japan's youngest mayor when voters in Shijonawate, a city of 53,000 in Osaka Prefecture, elected him to two terms. But running for the national legislature was a different story.

He lacked three essentials: name recognition, a party machine, and deep pockets. To compensate, he campaigned like a man on a mission -- posting nightly livestreams, running digital ads and appearing at train stations before dawn to greet commuters one by one.

Although he was known for spending lots of time taking questions and listening to the opinions of voters, few voters were moved by this. Sometimes, only one person showed up to his "dialogue meetings." Nonetheless, he held events in all 43 municipalities in Osaka.

On June 24, he held an event in Naniwa Ward that nine people attended. Among them was Yoshihiro Kuroda, 82, who listened to the discussion with his arms crossed at first. Azuma spoke about empathy and compromise. By the end, Kuroda approached him with an offer.

"My blood was pumping, and my heart was racing. For the first time in a long while, I found a candidate I wanted to support."

On the evening of July 13, one week before the vote, Azuma spoke to nearly 500 people gathered at the Osaka City Central Public Hall.

"There are words that I have engraved in my heart as a human being: 'The ultimate tragedy is not the oppression and cruelty by the bad people, but the silence over that by the good people,'" Azuma said, quoting King. He then appealed for a shared vision of a society built on dialogue rather than conflict.

In a political landscape where the ruling and opposition parties might switch roles, he emphasized that independent seats hold the greatest historical value. He described these seats as "unbiased and transparent" and said they allow people's voices to be heard directly. The hall erupted in thunderous applause.

Sanseito leader Kamiya attracted incomparably larger crowds with sharp-edged rhetoric and crowd-pleasing defiance. In Osaka, he responded to hecklers by saying, "If you get education wrong, you end up with adults like this," prompting cheers from his supporters.

In contrast, at a July 18 rally when one man shouted at Azuma, "Politics is bad! I'm sick of it!" from the back of a crowd of about 50 people, the former mayor went over to talk to him. Five minutes later, they were smiling and shaking hands.

The next day at a street speech in Tennoji Ward, a man in his 60s from Ikeda city listened to Azuma and remarked, "It has become standard practice to criticize your opponent to make yourself stand out, but that doesn't accomplish anything. Mr. Azuma's 'dialogue' leads to compromise."

Ultimately, Osaka voters rejected Azuma's philosophy of listening to others. His message was drowned out.

He received 128,224 votes, ranking 12th out of 19 candidates with a 3 percent vote share. He failed to meet the legally mandated threshold and forfeited his 3 million yen deposit in the process.

In contrast, Chisato Miyade, a newcomer from the Sanseito party, secured over 510,000 votes, placing third to win one of the four seats from the Osaka constituency. The once-fringe party was one of the biggest winners in the election, expanding its seats from two to 15.

"Look at Osaka's Dotombori -- it's chock-full of foreigners," Miyade said in a speech posted to X in May. "They buy up real estate and ignore Japanese customs. Is the government really protecting the assets of Japanese people?"

Her party's message carried further, faster and louder than anything Azuma could deliver.

For all his effort, Azuma's campaign ended as it began: small gatherings, polite applause, a candidate insisting that politics could be about listening rather than shouting.

But in a summer of populist anger and culture-war rhetoric, his quiet call for dialogue barely registered. Osaka voters chose louder voices.

A quiet voice in a loud election: Shuhei Azuma's lonely campaign