Nearly one in three candidates contesting Japan’s upper house election next month is a woman, a record number in a country with one of the world’s worst rates of female political representation.Of the 273 candidates running in the July 21 election, where 124 seats across the country are being contested, 82 are women – accounting for 30 per cent of candidates and surpassing the previous record of 27.6 per cent seen in the 2001 upper house election.Japan has one of the widest gender gaps in the…