Populist ideals are gaining traction in Japan, spurred by right-wing politicians running rampant elsewhere railing against “elitism,” “globalism” and immigration.
While Japanese Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba’s coalition lost its upper house majority in an election on Sunday, the “Japanese first” Sanseito party, created only five years ago, increased its seats from two to 15.
Sanseito’s agenda comes straight from the copybook of right-wing movements such as US President Donald Trump’s “Make America Great Again” (MAGA) the Alternative for Germany and Nigel Farage’s Reform party in the UK.
Photo: Reuters
That includes “stricter rules and limits” on immigration and foreign capital, opposition to “globalism” and “radical” gender policies, and a rethink on decarbonization and vaccines, and pesticide-free agriculture.
Founded on YouTube, Sanseito would “bring power back to the people,” party leader Sohei Kamiya, a 47-year-old former teacher and supermarket manager, wrote in the Japan Times.
Surveys have put immigration far down the list of voters’ concerns, who are much more worried about inflation and the economy, but for Sanseito, the influx of newcomers into Japan — where the immigration its economy badly needs is far lower than in other developed nations — is to blame for a host of ills, from crime to rising property prices to dangerous driving.
“It’s fine if they visit as tourists, but if you take in more and more foreigners, saying they’re cheap labor, then Japanese people’s wages won’t rise,” Kamiya said at a campaign event.
However, he added: “We are not exclusionary. We have never called to drive out foreigners.”
Meanwhile, online platforms have been flooded with disinformation, some of which Japanese fact-checking groups and the government have debunked.
Some posts falsely claimed that foreigners leave almost US$3 billion of medical bills unpaid a year, or that Chinese residents on welfare doubled in five years.
At a Sanseito election rally in front of Tokyo’s Shinagawa Railway Station, where orange T-shirted party workers handed out “Stop destroying Japan” flyers, one voter said that she was finally being heard.
“They put into words what I had been thinking about, but couldn’t put into words for many years,” said the 44-year-old IT worker on a precarious short-term contract. “When foreigners go to university, the Japanese government provides subsidies to them, but when we were going to university, everyone had huge debts.”
Russian bot accounts have been responsible for “large-scale information manipulation,” according to a much-read blog post by Ichiro Yamamoto from the Japan Institute of Law and Information Systems think tank.
That has been helped by artificial intelligence enabling better translation of material into Japanese.
More understanding toward Russia — something which was long anathema for Japanese right-wingers — is also a theme for Kamiya.
“Russia’s military invasion [of Ukraine] was of course bad, but there are forces in the United States that drove Russia into doing that,” Kamiya said, denying that he is “pro-Russia.”
He was forced during his campaign to deny receiving support from Moscow — which has been accused of backing similar parties in other nations — after a Sanseito candidate was interviewed by Russian state media.
As in other nations, the rise of Sanseito and its success has prompted the Japanese government to announce new immigration policies, and other parties to make promises during the election campaign.
Ishiba’s Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) proclaimed the goal of achieving “zero illegal foreign nationals,” and said the government would strengthen the management system for immigration and residency status.
Eight non-governmental organizations issued a joint statement last week, since backed by more than 1,000 groups, raising the alarm on “rapidly spreading xenophobia.”
“The argument that ‘foreigners are prioritized’ is totally unfounded demagoguery,” the statement said.
Hidehiro Yamamoto, politics and sociology professor at the University of Tsukuba, said that populism has not caught hold before because the LDP, unlike established parties elsewhere, has remained a “catch-all party.”
“The LDP has taken care of lower middle-class residents in cities, farmers in the countryside, and small and mid-sized companies,” Yamamoto said.
Pointing to the rise and decline of other new political parties in Japan in the past, he said is not sure that Sanseito would last.
“You can’t continue gaining support only with a temporary mood among the public,” Yamamoto said.
IDENTITY: A sex extortion scandal involving Thai monks has deeply shaken public trust in the clergy, with 11 monks implicated in financial misconduct Reverence for the saffron-robed Buddhist monkhood is deeply woven into Thai society, but a sex extortion scandal has besmirched the clergy and left the devout questioning their faith. Thai police this week arrested a woman accused of bedding at least 11 monks in breach of their vows of celibacy, before blackmailing them with thousands of secretly taken photos of their trysts. The monks are said to have paid nearly US$12 million, funneled out of their monasteries, funded by donations from laypeople hoping to increase their merit and prospects for reincarnation. The scandal provoked outrage over hypocrisy in the monkhood, concern that their status
The United States Federal Communications Commission said on Wednesday it plans to adopt rules to bar companies from connecting undersea submarine communication cables to the US that include Chinese technology or equipment. “We have seen submarine cable infrastructure threatened in recent years by foreign adversaries, like China,” FCC Chair Brendan Carr said in a statement. “We are therefore taking action here to guard our submarine cables against foreign adversary ownership, and access as well as cyber and physical threats.” The United States has for years expressed concerns about China’s role in handling network traffic and the potential for espionage. The U.S. has
A disillusioned Japanese electorate feeling the economic pinch goes to the polls today, as a right-wing party promoting a “Japanese first” agenda gains popularity, with fears over foreigners becoming a major election issue. Birthed on YouTube during the COVID-19 pandemic, spreading conspiracy theories about vaccinations and a cabal of global elites, the Sanseito Party has widened its appeal ahead of today’s upper house vote — railing against immigration and dragging rhetoric that was once confined to Japan’s political fringes into the mainstream. Polls show the party might only secure 10 to 15 of the 125 seats up for grabs, but it is
The US Department of Education on Tuesday said it opened a foreign funding investigation into the University of Michigan (UM) while alleging it found “inaccurate and incomplete disclosures” in a review of the university’s foreign reports, after two Chinese scientists linked to the school were separately charged with smuggling biological materials into the US. As part of the investigation, the department asked the university to share, within 30 days, tax records related to foreign funding, a list of foreign gifts, grants and contracts with any foreign source, and other documents, the department said in a statement and in a letter to
RSS