Japanese candidates are coming late to the social media party. Even though Japan has been holding elections for over a century, and is an early adopter of social media in other spheres of public life, it has lagged behind less developed countries in using the Internet for political campaigning. Candidates in Egypt and Tunisia, which held their first democratic elections only in the last two years, made extensive use of social media.

The change in the law, political experts and lawmakers hope, will inject much-needed transparency into the murky world of Japanese politics by giving voters direct access to lawmakers, and reverse chronically low voter turnout among young Japanese. In the last two parliamentary elections, in 2010 and 2012, turnout among voters in their 20s was less than 40 percent, compared with an almost 80 percent turnout for voters in their 60s and 70s, whose numbers are growing.

Japan’s archaic election rules seemed designed to keep things that way. A 1950 law, meant to level the playing field between rich and poor candidates, lays out in painstaking detail what candidates running for public office can and cannot do during the official campaign period. Leaflets are permitted, but only up to 70,000 sheets per person. TV ads promoting individual candidates are banned. So are free meals for supporters, though tea and refreshments are fair play.

And though the law predated the digital era, it was long interpreted to exclude any activities online during the official campaign period. So politicians who started to experiment with Facebook and Twitter as they gained in popularity found that they had to shut down their accounts during election time, when they needed to reach out to voters the most.