Sanseito party supporters rally during an election campaign tour at Shiba Park in Tokyo on July 19.Issei Kato/Reuters
Ian Buruma is the author of numerous books, including Year Zero: A History of 1945, The Collaborators: Three Stories of Deception and Survival in World War II, and, most recently, Spinoza: Freedom’s Messiah.
Like fascism in the 1930s, today’s right-wing populism is spreading like a virus, with each country catching its own strain based on local culture and history. Just as Catholic fascism in Portugal was not the same as National Socialism in Germany, the cult of U.S. President Donald Trump is different from Marine Le Pen’s French National Rally.
Japan now has its own brand of right-wing populism in the Sanseito party, which campaigned on the unimaginative slogan “Japanese First” ahead of the recent election to the parliament’s upper house. Sanseito was founded in 2020 by the boyish Kamiya Sohei, who once said that he would not “sell Japan out to Jewish capital,” and has portrayed gender equality as a form of communism.
Yet, with the ruling Liberal Democratic Party losing its majority in the House of Councillors, Sanseito was one of the election’s biggest winners, gaining 14 seats in the 248-member upper house, bringing its total to 15 lawmakers. While that’s not a huge number, it is enough to spook Japan’s mainstream conservatives, who are afraid of losing more votes to the far right.
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Despite harping on some common themes – vaccines, immigrants, diversity, gender and nationalism – the Japanese populists are a little different from far-right parties in other countries and from the older extreme right in Japan. The noisy sound trucks, which blared wartime patriotic songs, bore young ruffians in quasi-military gear and blighted Japanese cities for decades, traded mostly in nostalgia. They longed for Japan’s imperialist past, and blamed the United States, Japanese leftists and communist China for robbing Japan of its martial spirit and making the Japanese feel guilty about an entirely honourable war in Asia.
These marginal but noisy extremists, some of whose views on history gained purchase in mainstream conservative parties, took particular issue with the postwar pacifist constitution, written by American officials, that outlawed the projection of Japanese military power abroad.
But the topic that excites Japanese Firsters most is the presence of an increasing number of foreigners in Japan: immigrants, workers and tourists.
Compared with most countries, Japan has traditionally hosted few foreigners. The majority were ethnic Koreans, most of whom spoke only Japanese. Asylum seekers were almost always turned away. Most of the migrant workers who arrived in the 1980s, such as the Iranians who fled to Japan after the Iran-Iraq war, have left.
But this has started to change. There are now 3.8 million foreign residents in Japan, and more than 20 million tourists have benefited from the cheap yen in the first half of this year. These numbers are hardly overwhelming, however; foreigners comprise only 3 per cent of Japan’s population, compared with 10 per cent in France.
The Japanese government has encouraged mass tourism and immigration to create revenue and fill much-needed jobs in a rapidly aging society. But the results have dismayed enough Japanese that Sanseito was able to gain ground by blaming foreigners for a host of ills, from inflation and the rising cost of living to stagnant wages and rice shortages.
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Many foreign tourists and new residents are Chinese. This, too, marks a change. Starting from the early 20th century, Japanese right-wing nationalism was mostly anti-Western. These days, it is an increasingly powerful China that scares people. Many Japanese view the new crop of affluent Chinese tourists in the same way that Europeans regarded the “ugly Americans” who visited in the 1950s: They are repelled by their rough manners, insensitivity to local customs and the flaunting of their new wealth.
None of this would matter much if the People’s Republic of China were seen as a benign power. But China’s threats to expand its military reach and regain its traditional status as an imperial Asian hegemon are alarming to the Japanese.
The irony is that U.S. dominance in East Asia, including the postwar constitutional framework, was partly aimed at protecting Japan against the threat posed by China and other Communist powers. With Mr. Trump – a kind of hero to the Japanese Firsters – in the White House, the U.S. can no longer be relied on to provide a security guarantee.
China seeks to push the U.S. out of Asia. If the Chinese were able to invade Taiwan and seize control of the sea lanes around Japan without U.S. intervention, Japan would likely acquire its own nuclear weapons and lurch much further to the right. This is surely not what most Japanese would wish for. But nor, if they carefully thought about it, would the Chinese.
Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2025.