The Hard Right Comes for Japan
Xenophobic politics just blasted through the country’s staid consensus.
Hard-right anti-immigrant politics just got its beachhead in Japan, the land of sleepy, staid consensus politics. The Sanseitō Party, founded just five years ago, broke through from obscurity to claim almost 12.5% of the vote in yesterday’s Upper House election, landing itself a substantial bench of Councillors and proving that the appeal of the populist hard right isn’t confined to the West.
The ruling coalition led by the Liberal Democratic Party—the party that has governed Japan for 64 of the last 70 years—ended up just shy of the seats it needed for a majority. Already under strain following his party’s loss of Japan’s lower chamber last year, Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba vowed to continue in office to confront the threat of Donald Trump’s tariffs.
Clunkily rendered as the “Do it Yourself Party,” Sanseitō shocked Japan’s usually sleepy political scene in ways not fully reflected in its vote share. Rejecting the soporific style of the dark suit-wearing political establishment, Sanseitō hollered its Japanese People First message from the rooftops. With a style deeply steeped in the culture of the online right, Sanseitō built a campaign juggernaut around the nonsense that obsesses Japan’s army of disaffected posters: shifty foreigners, disgusting gays, iffy vaccines, oppressive mask mandates, deep state conspiracies, and the weird chemicals they put in your food.
The party’s unthinkable bluntness shocked the political class. Its 12.5% of the vote doesn’t come near to reflecting its seismic impact. Fueled by a flood of small-yen individual donations from its hugely energized membership, Sanseitō set the agenda for the entire campaign, with the more established parties constantly scrambling to respond to, attack, or co-opt the messages its brash and charismatic leader, Sohei Kamiya, put out day after day. Watching the whole sorry affair, you could sense Japanese politics changing in ways the vast majority of the people in the country aren’t really comfortable with, but which they are powerless to go against.
Consider Sanseitō’s constant attacks against foreign university students who supposedly receive cushy, all-expenses paid scholarships at taxpayers’ expense while hard-working Japanese students have to pile on two or three part-time jobs on the side to pay their way through school. Mainstream journalists exhausted themselves with fact-checking pieces showing that the scholarship program being referred to is tiny, and most Japanese students receive more generous support than the vast bulk of foreign students. But none of it mattered, because the story played great online. It was catnip for viral outrage, forcing everyone else onto the backfoot and making the election about the things Sanseitō wanted it to be about.
Japan is a weird place for an anti-immigrant party to flourish—there are hardly any immigrants here, and basically no undocumented people at all. Just 2.8% of residents in Japan are foreign born. And yet, while the number is small, it is growing—as recently as 1990, just 0.7% of people living in Japan had migrated there. Together with an almighty tourism boom, foreigners are now visible in Japan’s big cities in ways they never were before.
Of course, the purchasing power of Japanese people has been stagnating for a generation. A certain cast of mind will always blame newly-visible outsiders when your life sucks. So even though mainstream Japanese society is appalled by the rank xenophobia at the core of Sanseitō’s immigrant bashing, a largish minority will find that kind of pitch appealing.
Still, the scale of the departure is jarring. Sanseitō’s appeal comes from a place very far from Japan’s traditional nationalist right. That older style of rural right-wing politics has long been cornered by the Liberal Democratic Party, which, as Japan-watchers love to note, is neither liberal nor democratic nor a party. It isn’t liberal because of its deep conservatism (it was founded in 1955 as a merger between two conservative parties, the Liberals and the Democrats); it isn’t democratic because it’s enjoyed more continuous power than almost any other party on Earth; and it’s barely a party on account of its notorious factionalism—at least until the attempted abolition of the factions last year.
But the extent of the LDP’s dominance until now is hard to overstate. Which is why, watching TV coverage last night, it was impossible to avoid the sense that something huge had just happened in Japan. Sanseitō is all anyone talked about. Its policies are nothing like the LDP’s mix of traditional values and agricultural subsidies, and its voters are nothing like the LDP’s base of old-fashioned, temple-going farmers. The upstart party’s voters are urban, middle age, mostly male and terminally online—keyboard warriors more likely to spend their time in a knock-down, drag-out online fight than in a Shinto temple.
The LDP has been in power for so long, Japanese people sort of forget that there’s a theoretical possibility that someone else could run the country. But exhausted by a dour, lackluster prime minister, helpless before rising costs and a devalued yen, worn down by years of grubby corruption scandals, and now buffeted by a much more interesting hard-right alternative, the LDP is starting to look like an anachronism: a holdover from a previous era of political comity that hangs onto power from inertia more than anything else.
This all looks pretty dire. And yet Japan after LDP hegemony need not be the swaggering, xenophobic Japan of Sanseitō’s imagination. It’s easy to lose sight of the fact that the second biggest vote-getter behind the LDP was not Sanseitō but rather the Democratic Party for the People (DPFP).
Originally a splinter group from the chronically in-disarray Democratic Party of Japan, the DPFP put forward a smart, pro-growth centrist liberal program centered on an aggressive push for higher wages, lower taxes, and an unembarrassed return to nuclear power.
DPFP made its own bit of history on Sunday by getting the largest popular vote share of any opposition party—more even than the legacy Democratic Party it broke away from.
You won’t hear much about DPFP in today’s post-game analysis—everybody is still too shell-shocked by Sanseitō’s breakthrough. But in the longer term, the hard-right is a dead end for Japan. A country looking for a credible way out of the LDP morass will do much better to look beyond the toxic too-online right represented by Sanseitō.
Quico Toro is a contributing editor at Persuasion, Director of Climate Repair at the Anthropocene Institute, and writes the Substack One Percent Brighter.
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