Populism Comes to Japan

NEW YORK — Like fascism in the 1930s, today’s right-wing populism spreads 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 US President Donald Trump is different from Marine Le Pen’s French National Rally or the Sweden Democrats.

Japan now has its own brand of right-wing populism in the Sanseitō party, which campaigned on the unimaginative slogan «Japanese First» ahead of the recent election to the parliament’s upper house. Sanseitō was founded in 2020 by the boyish Kamiya Sohei, who once said that he would not «sell Japan out to Jewish capital, ” and portrayed gender equality as a form of Communism. (Another party member, Matsuda Manabu, has called the COVID-19 vaccine a «murder weapon.»)

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, blaring wartime patriotic songs and bearing young ruffians in quasi-military gear, that have blighted Japanese cities for many 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 honorable 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. Another subject that was broadcast almost daily through loudspeakers around busy railway stations was Russia’s annexation in 1945 of a few small islands in the Western Pacific that once belonged to Japan.

Kamiya, for his part, also refuses to acknowledge that Japan did anything wrong in World War II. But the topic that excites Japanese Firsters most is the presence of an increasing number of foreigners in Japan — immigrants, workers, and tourists.

Compared to 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.

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 Sanseitō 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.

Many foreign tourists and new residents are Chinese. This, too, marks a change from the past. Starting from the early twentieth century, Japanese right-wing nationalism was mostly anti-Western. Before WWII, Americans were blamed for polluting the purity of Japanese culture with crass commercialism, and for standing in the way of Japanese supremacy in Asia. After the war, the nationalists’ bugbear was the «peace» constitution.

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 Chinese 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 US 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 Trump — a kind of hero to the Japanese Firsters — in the White House, the US can no longer be relied on to provide a security guarantee.

China seeks to push the US out of Asia. If the Chinese were able to invade Taiwan and seize control of the sea lanes around Japan without US 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.