Why aren't Asia's politicians tweeting?

You’d have thought that after President Obama’s groundbreaking success using Twitter to boost his presidential campaign, governments and politicians around the world would be jumping on the micro-blogging bandwagon to amp up their Net cred.

Hardly.

From Japan to Thailand, what attempts have been made by Asian government officials to connect with Tweeple have fallen flat.

In Japan, where one might expect social networking to be a no-brainer for politicians, political tweeting suffers from a case of ‘what could have been.’

Official tweeting in Japan got off a promising start. With the August 30 Diet lower house elections approaching, a number of politicians started their own Twitter pages as a way of reaching out to the country’s disaffected young voters. At least five legislators were tweeting on a regular basis.

Said the Liberal Democratic Party’s hopeful Gaku Hashimoto to The Japan Times: “In Japan, there is a long tradition of haiku, in which a very deep message is conveyed through far fewer words than even short Twitter posts."

The catch?

Under existing laws, politicians are banned from tweeting in the 12 days leading up to elections. That, and the fact that most prefer domestic networking site Mixi makes it hard for tweeting to make a real mark in Japanese politics. Mixi users in Japan outnumber Twitter users by about 100 to one.

In Thailand, tweeters waited excitedly for a political showdown on Twitter that never came.

When word got out that adversaries Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva and former premier Thaksin Shinawatra had both gotten Twitter accounts, many bloggers tittered – and Twittered -- in anticipation of the coming battle of thumbs.

But so far, the only war raging between Abhisit and Thaksin has been the race for followers. Current scoreboard: Abhisit 22,819, Thaksin 28,912.

Not that the two are actually tweeting themselves -- staffers do it for them. The tweets are boring, bloggers say, mostly excerpts from each man’s public speeches.

No wonder Abhisit was baffled when a birthday message was found posted on Thaksin’s Twitter account last month.

In India, state minister for external affairs Shashi Tharoor became the first public official to tweet.

The ‘Twitter minister’ is apparently loving it -- since June he’s been responding to public questions and has introduced young MP K. Sudhakaran to the site.

In Shanghai, where Twitter is officially blocked, the government has paradoxically opened a Twitter page for the 2010 World Expo.

Hong Kong’s politicians have yet to employ Twitter in any significant way.

We think it’ll be great if Asian politicians tweet more. Young voters in Asia, like anywhere else in the world, are mostly apathetic, and Twitter is a good way to keep politics hip and interactive. And we reckon politicians in this part of the world need humanizing—in reserved cultures like Japan, government figurehead aren’t used to opening up to the public.

Now, if only more people signed on to Twitter in Asia.