The little white vans drive up and down the streets relentlessly.

Inside is a smiling candidate, waving from the rear window wearing white gloves.

The glove thing dates back about 50 years and gives the impression of a candidate's clean image and helps people see their waving hand from down the street.

Electioneering methods in Japan are dated, to say the least.

Electioneering methods in Japan can look a bit old fashioned to outsiders. ( ABC News: Rachel Mealey )

"Japanese elections are run in a way that looks a little bit old-fashioned and traditional to those of us from coming from other countries and part of that is because their electoral law hasn't really changed for many decades," said Rob Fahey, from the graduate school of political science at Tokyo's Waseda University.

Television campaigning is restricted and billboards are banned, so politicians resort to wearing out their shoe leather and pressing the flesh.

"Everything has to be in accordance with a very strict set of laws which define everything down to how big the leaflets you put through people's doors have to be," Mr Fahey said.

Older politicians tend to run very traditional, "home-spun" campaigns, a political science expert says. ( ABC News: Rachel Mealey )

The electoral laws were changed in 2013 to allow campaigning on social media, but major parties seem loath to adapt to new ways.

The Governor of Tokyo, Yuriko Koike, made headlines early on during the campaign when she started a new party to spoil Prime Minister Abe's parliamentary majority.

Called the Party of Hope, it heralded a new era of electioneering in this country, but it was not meant to be.

An early tweet from the party read:

"The staff of Party of Hope are not used to Twitter, but we will work hard using your support as encouragement."

In Japan, television campaigning is restricted and billboards are banned. ( ABC News: Rachel Mealey )

Mr Fahey said major parties just do not understand how to use platforms such as Twitter and Facebook effectively.

"There's a real dichotomy here, because Japan is at once the biggest consumer of social media in the world … [but] the tendency is for older politicians, or people who are in more established circumstances, to just use social media to try and tell people to come along to the supermarket and watch them give a speech on top of an orange box," he said.

"It's supporting their very traditional, very home-spun campaigns rather than being a way that they go out and try to engage with new communities of voters or get young people to go out and vote for them."

The Japanese election is on October 22.