‘Japanese First': The deep roots of the rising far right

France 24

3 days ago

Japan's centre-right Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), which has governed the country almost without interruption since the end of World War II, lost its majority in the country's upper house over the weekend. Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba seems determined to remain in office despite calls from both party and public for his resignation. At this point, it's not clear that he can.
More surprising than the party's loss of support, though, is where those votes went. Rather than benefitting the established opposition, the LDP instead found itself losing ground to more strident right-wing groups, including the far-right Sanseito party, which seized a record 14 seats.
Explicitly inspired by far-right political forces in the US and Europe including US President Donald Trump's MAGA movement, Alternative for Germany and France's National Rally, the 'Japanese First' group has championed severely restricting the number of migrants in Japan – to be capped at 5 percent of the native-born population in each municipality – tightening the rules around naturalisation, encouraging women to leave the workplace to become stay-at-home mothers and preventing any recognition of the female Imperial Line.
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Launched on YouTube in the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic, Sanseito gained its first followers with a barrage of videos opposing public health measures put in place by the government to stem the virus's spread, including mask mandates, vaccine requirements and PCR testing.
As its audience grew, free videos giving viewers health and well-being advice increasingly gave way to members-only content preaching a global conspiracy by liberal elites to corrode Japan's moral and cultural strength.
The group won its first upper house seat in 2022, with 56-year-old leader Sohei Kamiya – a former supermarket manager and reservist in Japan's military Self-Defence Forces – publishing a pamphlet during the campaign claiming that 'international financial capital affiliated with Jews' were pushing for mask mandates to 'incite exaggerated fears of the coronavirus pandemic'.
At the heart of this narrative was what the growing ranks of Sanseito cadres called a 'silent invasion' of foreigners, buying up the nation's infrastructure, growing fat on stolen welfare, raising crime rates and dragging down wages for native-born workers.
For those who have watched the rise of far-right nativist groups across the world, it's a familiar tale – albeit one that feels somewhat out of place in Japan, a country where immigrants make up just 3 percent of the country's shrinking population.
Japan's government loses upper house majority
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Although immigration remains meagre compared to other developed countries, Akira Igarashi, an assistant professor at Osaka University's Faculty of Human Sciences who researches policy and social attitudes towards migrants, said the number of people moving to Japan had risen sharply in the decades since 1989, when the country uneasily opened its borders to migrant labour.
'Nowadays it's almost 3 percent out of the total population, while about 10 years ago, it was more like 1.5 or 1.6," he said.
Having long relied on its vast rural workforce and mass-mechanisation of heavy industry, Japan began in the 1980s to attract more and more migrant workers from across Asia and the Japanese diaspora in Latin America. These workers were largely drawn to the country's small- and medium-scale manufacturers and service industries, meeting a demand that has only grown more acute as Japan's population ages and its birthrates drop.
Paired with Japan's long-stagnant economy, the weakening yen has led to a sense of economic decline compounded with a global cost-of-living crisis that has hit the nation hard.
'The combination – economic decline and the drastic increase in the migrant population – makes a political opportunity for the anti-migrant party, the radical Sanseito party,' Igarashi said.
He said that Sanseito and similar right-wing populist parties in Japan had consciously adopted the rhetoric adopted by far-right forces in the US and Western Europe.
'I think they studied quite a lot of the case of the US and European societies,' Igarashi said. 'They evoke the threat from migrants – although of course, it's not there – but they evoke and they agitate the threat of migrants.'
For example, he said these groups falsely claim that immigrants have increased the crime rate or are given preferential access to welfare benefits, or that 'Japanese society and the country's economic situation has declined' because of them.
Blaming immigrants 'sounds very convincing' in a social environment such as Japan's, which he noted is a 'relatively ethnically and culturally homogeneous country'.
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But although Sanseito's self-consciously MAGA-style rhetoric may have the ring of a foreign import, Japan is no stranger to more home-grown ultranationalist movements.
Karin Narita, a research associate in Japanese politics and international relations at the University of Sheffield, said that the right wing of the LDP had long harboured figures with revisionist views of Imperial Japan's own legacy of racial supremacy.
'There's a real turn in the early 1990s, where there's a re-emergence [of] much more culturalist exclusionary, nationalist politicians – like former prime minister [Shinzo] Abe and his supporters, who would have had much more kind of anti-Asian sentiment at an ideological level,' she said.
'So there was a lot of support around nationalist educational movements, a lot of issues around voting rights for non-citizen special residents – who are primarily post-colonial Korean and Chinese communities that are in Japan because of the legacy of World War II and imperialism.'
Japan is home to hundreds of thousands of ethnic Korean and Chinese people whose families arrived in the country as colonial subjects before and during World War II. Many of whom still lack legal citizenship despite having lived in the country for generations.
In the last two to three decades, Narita said, there has been 'a lot of shifting within the conservative party that accommodates much more reactionary ideological sentiments'.
Abe was, like many LDP members, part of the ultranationalist Nippon Kaigi group, accused of lobbying for negationist policies aimed at rehabilitating the legacy of fascist Imperial Japan. While prime minister, Abe publicly and repeatedly denied state involvement in the systematic sexual enslavement of Korean and Chinese women – known as 'comfort women' – during Imperial Japan's expansionist campaigns across Asia. The premier also downplayed Japanese atrocities in the Chinese city of Nanjing, visited a memorial shrine that included tributes to war criminals and tried to revise Japan's pacifist post-war constitution to allow the country to launch offensive military actions abroad.
Igarashi said that the LDP had also helped promote anti-migrant sentiment through its efforts to head off Sanseito's assault on its right flank.
'On one hand, the LDP became more anti-migrant during the election campaign – I think this is quite similar to the US and European society – because the radical right Sanseito party made the migrant issue more central in Japanese society,' he said. 'And the LDP and the other parties tried to catch up on that issue – and the LDP especially, because they are more conservative.'
'They tried to establish a new institution to observe migrants, their lives and behaviours, and they called migrants illegal,' he said. 'So they became more anti-migrant during the election campaign, and evoked the threat to Japanese citizens even more.'
Kamiya has roundly rejected the idea that his party is xenophobic.
'There is a real, very acute understanding, broadly speaking, that with the aging population there is a real, pragmatic economic need for a source of labour,' Narita said. 'And so in many ways, this sort of anti-foreign sentiment hasn't necessarily been as politicised to the same extent towards migrant communities who are very clearly filling that economic need. It's more subtle in the sense that what is being fostered … isn't necessarily about an overtly racist rhetoric as much as it's about a necessity of protecting Japanese culture.'
But scratch the surface, she said, and it becomes clear that the party's vision of Japanese society remains rooted in racialised ideals of blood and belonging.
In one of Sanseito's proposed policies, she said, the party would explicitly prohibit foreigners from having voting or civic rights, and it would not allow naturalised citizens to be able to hold public office until they had been naturalised for three generations.
'So, on one hand, in public discourse there's a lot of dancing around the issue … it's about 'Japaneseness' and Japanese sentiment,' she said. 'But if you really get down to what the upshot is public policy-wise, what they would do – it's this incredibly racialised, hierarchical understanding of Japaneseness.'