Japan’s upstart populist-conservative party Sanseito is causing major headaches for Prime Minister Ishiba Shigeru’s Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) in this weekend’s election, peeling off just enough votes to bring Ishiba’s minority coalition government down.
Sanseito is a new party, founded in 2020 and winning its first parliamentary seat in 2022. Its trajectory is similar to other populist-conservative parties that became influential over the past decade in the United Kingdom and Europe, and for that matter President Donald Trump’s Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement in the United States, though Sanseito could not presently dream of replicating MAGA’s success. Sanseito is far more extreme than the American movement — not only opposed to illegal aliens and mass migration, it dislikes all foreigners, even tourists.
Sanseito could win 10 to 15 seats on Sunday, running on a platform of “Japan First” that attempts to echo Trump’s “America First” message. That would be enough to make trouble for the LDP, which lost control of the lower house of the National Diet in October and might lose the upper house next. LDP cannot afford to lose more than 16 seats this election.
LDP has been in power for most of the seven decades since the end of World War II, but its dominance has slipped amid corruption scandals and economic disappointment. Polls suggest a fair number of Japanese voters are looking to register their protest against LDP without completely overturning its governing approach.
As its date of birth suggests, Sanseito was conceived over popular resistance to draconian controls during the Wuhan coronavirus pandemic. The winner of the party’s first seat in the Diet, Kamiya Sohei, distributed pamphlets that railed against “forces that aim to make huge profits” by “calling for wearing masks to incite exaggerated fears of the coronavirus pandemic.” He identified those forces as “organizations centered around international financial capital affiliated with Jews.”
Kamiya later took command of the party from its original leader, former lawmaker Matsuda Manabu, who famously described the novel coronavirus as a “lethal weapon.” Kamiya broadened the party’s appeal with a flood of nationalist, conspiratorial, and lifestyle videos on his popular YouTube channel, which presented itself as a university curriculum in uncovering hidden truths and “real” history.
A recurring theme in the rise of populist parties since the coronavirus pandemic is the establishment casually dismissing them as kooky purveyors of crackpot conspiracy theories. The problem with that contemptuous approach is that the general public no longer trusts establishment “experts” relying on institutional authority.
A large number of Japanese youths were ready to listen to a party that pointed out the theatrical futility of wearing cloth masks to stop a coronavirus. Mass migration and the coronavirus pandemic were a devastating one-two punch that convinced many Americans, Europeans, and Japanese that their ruling class hates them and has no problem lying to them.
Sanseito’s name literally translates to “Political Participation Party,” but its devotees actually prefer a loose English translation, “The Party of Do It Yourself,” as their motto. The party’s philosophy is one of grassroots activism and robust individualism.
Like other populist parties today, Sanseito gained influence by talking about immigration. This might seem odd, since Japan historically has very low rates of immigration, but there are more foreigners living in Japan today than before 2020 while the native population has experienced one of the steepest demographic declines in the world. Sanseito is unabashedly ethno-nationalist, insisting that Japanese land should be reserved for Japanese people.
Foreign-born residents now make up about three percent of Japan’s population, which seems trivial to Americans or Europeans of the 21st Century, but is a large number historically for Japan. The percentage is much higher in certain towns with big foreign enclaves, like the Kurdish community in Saitama prefecture, and Sanseito tends to poll very well in those towns.
Sanseito’s followers reject what they see as preferential treatment given to foreigners, disapprove of tourist money causing inflation for local consumers, and fear their government will eventually address Japan’s demographic crisis with mass migration policies. Kamiya’s manifesto calls instead for restoring Japanese fertility rates with tax cuts and childcare benefits.
When Sanseito held a party conference in February to kick around ideas for a new national constitution, one of the proposals was a “supreme law” that would state “Japan belongs to the Japanese people, and foreign ownership of Japanese land is not permitted.”
Another was to revive the national slogan, “Unify the Eight Corners of the World,” the motto of Imperial Japan during World War II.
“Anti-foreign sentiment that was considered maybe taboo to talk about so openly is now out of the box,” Kanda University lecturer Jeffrey Hall told Reuters on Wednesday.
That sentiment has clearly influenced the LDP as it struggles to capture some of Sanseito’s populist energy and bring disgruntled voters home on Sunday. Prime Minister Ishiba’s sales pitch in the homestretch included a task force against “crimes and disorderly conduct” by foreigners and “zero” illegal immigration. Ishiba clearly knows that he might have to talk to Sanseito if he wants to cobble together a functional coalition in the Diet after a weak performance on Sunday’s ballot.
Sanseito is currently polling at roughly 5.9 percent with five seats in the Diet — which does not sound like much, but LDP’s long dominance of Japanese politics means none of the opposition parties can get into double digits on its own. Depending on how the election goes, Sanseito could emerge from the contest as Japan’s fourth-largest party.
Kamiya, at just 47 years old, has shored up some of Sanseito’s weaknesses in an attempt to build a long-term movement, such as its heavy reliance upon young male supporters. One of the party’s candidates is a female singer named Saya, who is bidding to make Sanseito cool for young women by winning a seat in Tokyo.
Kamiya and other party leaders have also been wooing disgruntled LDP voters who feel betrayed by the party’s corruption scandals, lackluster economic performance, and turn away from traditional Japanese cultural values. Some Sanseito partisans point to the LDP embracing same-sex marriage as a deal-breaking shift to the left. Others say LDP is too soft on China.
When LDP lost its lower house majority in October, it was obliged to cooperate with center-left parties to get anything done in the Diet, which further angered some conservative voters.
“They present a bizarre mix of policies. There’s no clear connection among these policies, and it’s hard to place them ideologically, but each one resonates with some part of their support base,” Doshisha University political scientist Yoshida Toru told Bloomberg News.
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