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Hi Blog.  Here’s my latest column on the Japan Upper House Elections last month, developing something I wrote before the elections. I’ve decided that, despite all the feedback on Debito.org saying we should be alarmed, I’m offering a shrug.  Hear me out, below.  I look forward to more of your feedback.  Debito Arudou, Ph.D.

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THE JULY 2025 *RIGHTWARD-SWING” ELECTION IS OVERBLOWN

Yes, there is a new far-right party in Japan.  But at this point the media hype about Sanseito is sensationalism, as what it’s offering is neither new nor well-planned.

By Debito Arudou, Shingetsu News Agency Visible Minorities column 69, August 24, 2025

By the time I had completed my column last month, Japan had its July 20, 2025, Upper House Elections.  They deserve comment in this space, but not for the reasons you might expect.

The major takeaway was the ruling conservative parties (the Liberal Democratic Party and Komeito) lost seats, while the opposition parties on the right, left, and center generally gained.  

Notably, for the first time since the LDP was founded in 1955, the party lost its ruling majority in both the Upper and Lower Houses of Parliament.  This meant they had to expand their coalition to stay in power.  Which they did—Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba stayed PM.  

So my read is that we’ll have to wait and see whether Japan’s parliamentary system will become as fragile as, say, Postwar Italy’s has been, with elections every few months (until recently) as coalitions fail.

My read is pretty milquetoast.  But that’s not what the media shouted about.

SANSEITO AS THE NEXT BIG POLITICAL MOVEMENT?

The headlines were dominated by the rise of new far-right party called Sanseito, a “burgeoning” “election force” that “won big” and became “the talk of the town”.  

Sanseito nakedly trumpeted Trump themes by campaigning on a *Japan First* strategy, singling out foreigners as the cause of Japan’s woes, and promising all manner of xenophobic policies to further disenfranchise, penalize, limit if not expel Non-Japanese.  Their essential point is that foreign residents aren’t real members of Japanese society—even if they naturalize—and should never be entitled to equal access to the things they pay taxes for or are guaranteed under the constitution.

Now, one would expect that I would be “doing a Debito” here, megaphoning from the rooftops about a new era where Japan is becoming fascist.  

But I’m actually going to argue the froth is a bit overblown.  I won’t go so far as to tell people to ignore Sanseito, but this election is more a case study of media hype than of a definitive political shift.  Because Sanseito is saying nothing new and still has no real power.

SANSEITO GAINED SEATS, BUT…

First, let’s start with a sense of scale.  Sanseito is now at 15 seats in the Upper House, up from only a single seat before the election.  It did punch above its weight in terms of total votes from constituencies and proportional representation votes.  But that’s really the strongest case you can make for a new rightward swing in Japan.  

But in terms of raw numbers, in a chamber of 248 seats, Sanseito only occupies six percent of them.  It still remains only the sixth largest party in the Upper House.  That’s not really power-broker or even swing-voter status yet.  They can’t, for example, submit budget bills involving public spending until they reach 20 seats.

Second, bear in mind that the Upper House is the less powerful of the two chambers anyway.  In my experience, the Lower House is where the serious politicians dwell and have tugs-of-war with the ministerial mandarins, who are the real policymakers in Japan.  The Upper House, however, is where the celebrity, larker, clown, and dilettante candidates have some fun before they rubber-stamp what’s tossed up to them.  

That means that Sanseito is right where they belong—in the clown-car fringe-party zone that every developed parliamentary system provides venting voters.

SANSEITO IS IN FACT NOT SAYING ANYTHING NEW

Sanseito has indeed said outlandish (and outright false) things about the foreign element in Japan, proffering propaganda that is hateful, overt, and unabashed.  I have no doubt that if in power, they would relish sticking it to anyone who doesn’t fall under their definition of *true Japanese* (including ideologically).  They are not merely authoritarians who want to dominate by any means necessary.  They are fascists, in that they imbue their populism with racist and ethnocentric ideologies, and they would dismantle democracy with a smile.

But I’ve written about Japan’s politicians for decades now, and for all of Sanseito’s racist statements, every single one of them I’ve seen in other parties and candidates, both in slogans during elections and while in office afterwards.  Bigotry was always intrinsic, for example, to ruling LDP policy proposals (recall Nippon Kaigi in the highest echelons of elected government), and it went down easily with the fearful and ignorant.  

Now recall how blatantly racist former Tokyo Governor Shintaro Ishihara was, and re-elected to power for decades.  Then factor in the decades of prejudicial performance art in prefectural representatives, city mayors, neighborhood associations, local assemblies, etc.  Unlike Sanseito, these people were in positions of real power to craft actual xenophobic public policies.  And they did.

And how about the regularized racial profiling and search-and-seizure powers (sometimes with deadly force) of the Japanese police?  The local businesses putting up unconstitutional yet completely legal “Japanese Only” signs?  The unfettered racist landlords who make every apartment hunt an ordeal for Visible Minorities?  And the constant drumbeat of “We Japanese* exclusionary narratives in Japanese media?

That’s why you get constant alienation as the rule rather than the exception in Japan, whether as part of political sloganeering or merely as part of daily life for Japan’s foreign residents.

In other words, it’s not much of a leap from *Japanese Only* to *Japan First*—either in terms of content or intent.

Given that  “Japanese Only” signs have been around verifiably since 1992, and Japan still hasn’t made them illegal despite signing international treaty in 1996, I could argue that Sanseito have been laggards, behind the curve for more than thirty years.  

My point is that Sanseito is nothing new.  What’s new is the LDP is now being seen as part of the problem by Japan’s reactionaries.

It was the government’s bright idea to bring in all those foreigners as laborers and tourists to man convenience stores and shake Japan’s moneymaker.  

But I’m not being sarcastic here.  It was a bright idea.  “Cool Japan” etc. has been a resounding success.  The Japanese economy has grown so dependent on foreign inflow that even the LDP has changed its tune, denouncing discrimination and prejudice (while also tossing out some right-wing chum to lure some votes away during the election).  Clearly that strategy didn’t work.  

WHO’S MORE WORRIED ABOUT SANSEITO?  THE MEDIA

So Sanseito’s rise isn’t altogether unexpected.  It’s what you get when voters feel their regular valve for voting their regular pet grievances has disappeared.  It’s a protest vote.  

But it’s not clear this is a bellwether of a sustainable social movement, as plenty of dead parties in Japanese politics can attest.

So why did we get the big headlines?  Because of the rise of the Global Far Right.  

America, despite being the world’s flagship “arsenal of democracy,” is turning fascist.  

Accordingly, hot-fingered journalists are asking whether Japan is the next domino of rising xenophobic parties, as seen in Hungary’s Orban, Italy’s Meloni, Britain’s Brexit, Netherlands’ Wilders, France’s Le Pen, Germany’s AfD, or India’s Modi.  

Yet, as argued above, Japan’s politics has been politically ethnostatist for decades.  It’s just now the media has a peg and a fringe party to hang their articles on.

So despite all that, Sanseito still has no real power to change anything.  Yet.

WHEN SHOULD WE WORRY ABOUT SANSEITO?

As noted by scholars of how modern democracies die (see for example Levitsky and Ziblatt’s groundbreaking work), we should fear political pendulum swings when the pendulum cannot swing back, i.e., when the opposition can never take a turn again at leadership because they have been systemically shut out of power forever.

This happens when the anti-democrats voted into office have concrete plans for domination, not just populist slogans.  

For example, they make unconstitutional activities legal by targeting people’s civil rights, “capture referees” by stacking judiciaries and politicizing the civil service, sideline the opposition by portraying political rivals as evil and unentitled to power, and dismantle institutions offering checks and balances that fetter fascists with the rule of law.  

Sanseito is nowhere near that threshold of planning.  They have scribbled out some rewarmed prewar ideas about constitutional reforms and enforcing patriotism (again, all LDP policies that didn’t cause such alarm before), and some populist slogans about restoring traditional family values, lowering taxes, excluding foreigners, restoring the primacy of the Emperor, etc. 

Yes, some worrisome stuff incompatible with a modern democracy.  But it’s nothing as workable as the U.S. Heritage Foundation’s 920-page “Project 2025.”  Read it sometime and see how granular it is.

Plus if Sanseito went from fringe to real power, they would have to face the formidable Japanese bureaucracy, which has steered Japan basically from its inception.  It’s even more siloed and impenetrable than the one Trump is dismantling.  

That’s why, even in Japan’s one-party state, Japan’s Diet Members do not draft policy.  Even PM Cabinet Members are expected to listen to what’s going on in their ministries but never touch the controls.  You’d need a lot of pages in your Project 2025 to tackle that.

THE NEXT STEPS:  BIRDS OF A FEATHER 

What is worrisome is that in Sanseito, finally the Global Far Right has someone they can relate to.  

Both Trump and Steve Bannon tried hobnobbing with their far-right hero, former PM Shinzo Abe, and only got so far.  After all, in terms of staying in power, Japan’s LDP is the most successful political party in any liberal democracy, and as such is as institutionalized as the mandarins at maintaining the status quo. 

But the next steps are in progress.  This was seen when the U.S. Republican Party adopted Hungary’s Orban’s tactics for consolidating control, representatives of the Global Far Right have already met with Sanseito and offered their playbook.  

One could also argue that Japan is more susceptible to the appeal of fascism.  It’s much easier for the latent bigotry of “Japan First” to sell to a public that intuitively believes it anyway.

Those are the warning signs.  But I still believe we’re not there yet.  Even the LDP is talking with the leftist Constitutional Democratic Party to preserve ideological centrism, which is how other imperiled democracies have historically warded off their authoritarians.  

CONCLUSION:  WAIT AND SEE

That’s why my conclusion is that the alarmist headlines about last month’s elections are premature.  it will take a few more elections for the staying power of Sanseito to become clear.  

After all, it took Trump’s operatives ten years to learn how they could fix the system in their favor forever.  

And despite the Global Far Right’s playbook, the fear of fascism itself might offer enough cautionary tale (as seen recently in Canadian elections) for Japan to stave it off.  

Recall what happened recently in South Korea, where they routed a soft coup in mere weeks.  Why?  They’ve been through a brutal authoritarianism before.  

So has Japan, albeit a few generations ago, but their fascism utterly destroyed the country.  Historical amnesia is on the rise, but that basic fact has not been forgotten.  

Sometimes societies have to go through an autocracy before they develop antibodies to it.  It’s entirely possible that Trump is as much a vaccine as he is a plague.

But to return to my original point:  I still say that Sanseito is still half-baked cosplay fascism at the moment.  Belay the sensational headlines and see how this plays out.  At this stage, only time will tell what side will learn well enough to seize or preserve power.

ENDS

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