Japan’s election laws restrict door-to-door canvassing, so political campaigns tend to be short, ritualised affairs. Most candidates make their pitches in recorded messages blasted from sound-trucks or speeches near transport hubs.
Outside our train station in west Tokyo, the Conservative Party of Japan this month bemoaned the growing presence of “foreigners”. As an Irishman who has lived in Japan for a quarter of a century, I wondered if I was being singled out.
“No, no,” the candidate, a man in his 60s assured me, “just those foreigners who don’t follow the rules.”
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It wasn’t especially reassuring. Another candidate, Takashi Tachibana, leader of the NHK Party, last week gave a strikingly xenophobic speech: “It’s scary when groups of black people or people of Islamic background are gathered in front of the station.”
Both those parties are considered fringe and well to the right in the Japanese political spectrum (Tachibana wears a Maga hat and calls himself the “Japanese Trump”). More significant is Sanseito, meaning “do it yourself”, a new party platforming a Trump-lite “Japan first” message.
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Sanseito is running in the July 20th house of representatives election on an anti-immigration platform. Its candidates warn of “globalists” and rising crime by foreigners. They pitch a manifesto that stipulates restrictions on immigration and land purchases by non-Japanese.
“Japanese people feel unease and dissatisfaction because there are no established rules for accepting foreigners,” said the party leader Sohei Kamiya, who got into hot water during an election in 2022 when he promised not to “sell out Japan to Jewish capital”.
“Foreigners tend to forge anything and are good at finding legal loopholes,” he said in another speech. Kamiya insists that he magnanimously speaks only for the “many Japanese citizens frustrated that too much money is being spent on social security and education support for foreigners”.
None of this rhetoric has harmed his political career. Kamiya won an upper house seat in the 2022 house of councillors election, in which his party bagged about 1.7 million votes. Some analysts predict Senseito could double that on July 20th.
In time-honoured fashion, mainstream political parties are now toughening their pitch to avoid being outflanked by the right. The Liberal Democratic Party, which has ruled Japan for all but a handful of years since 1955, has called for “zero illegal foreign nationals”.
All sides claim to be tapping into a festering pool of popular resentment. A joint poll last month by NHK, Japan’s public service broadcaster, found that 64 per cent of Tokyoites thought “foreigners were unduly favoured in Japanese society”.
Much of this resentment is unfounded. A group of Japanese non-governmental organisations said this month the claim that foreign nationals are better treated than locals is “completely baseless”, given that they cannot vote or claim welfare. Crime rates by non-Japanese are lower than for the general population.
What makes the anti-immigration campaign more striking is that the percentage of foreign residents in Japan is still small – just three per cent. Compare that to Ireland, where the foreign-born population is around 22-23 per cent of the total population. The number of “illegal aliens” in Japan – about 74,000 – is tiny for such a powerful country.
The perception that foreigners “break the rules” is heightened, however, by rogue behaviour among the huge influx of tourists who now crowd Japan’s cities. Incidents such as the tourist who did pull-ups on the gates of a Shinto shrine are endlessly circulated on social media, inflaming local opinion.
But a deeper malaise is at play, too. Poverty and wealth disparities are growing in Japan. And as the native population ages and shrinks, the prospect of a foreigner on every street looms. Japan is hardly the only country susceptible to populist messages that play on fears of this potentially enormous change.
Senseito, which is made largely of anti-establishment, amateur politicians, seems to understand this. Among other policies, it advocates public ownership of key infrastructure, such as transport, and the distribution of “rice coupons” to poor households. Importing too much cheap labour from abroad, meanwhile, warns Kamiya, means “Japanese people’s wages won’t rise,” he said.
Just because the message has been heard a thousand times in history doesn’t make it any less potent.
