Following dismal results in Japan’s parliamentary elections, there is a broad consensus among Japanese lawmakers and political analysts that Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba’s days are numbered. No one, however, seems to have said that directly to Ishiba, who has vowed to stay on.
The current political crisis is the result of a July 20 election in Japan’s upper house, the less-powerful chamber in parliament. It has no direct role in determining the prime minister but is an indicator of political fortunes in a country where the foundation of individual leaders is generally unstable, even as the ruling party remains solid.
Ishiba’s Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), which has been in power for 64 of the past 70 years since its founding in 1955, lost its majority—even with the added support of its religious-backed coalition partner, Komeito. The ruling coalition now has 122 of the 248 seats in the upper house, and with just 220 of the 465 seats in the lower house, its grasp on power is tenuous.
This decline has, however, failed to provide any boost to the main opposition parties. The Constitutional Democratic Party, created from a merger of parties in 2017 and whose predecessors managed to grab power from 2009 to 2012, has 148 seats in the lower house and just 38 in the upper house.
Instead, Japan is joining the growing cadre of western nations where young voters, especially men, rely on social media for their view of the world and don’t like what they see. As elsewhere, this has created anger over easy targets, including higher prices and foreigners—but the populists who have emerged as a result haven’t offered any clear policies. The telegenic Sanseito party, which emerged from an angry YouTube channel and campaigned on the familiarly nebulous concept of “Japanese First,” was the big winner in the recent election, taking 15 seats, up from just one previously, and a respectable 15 percent of the vote for proportional candidates in the two-stage election. This still leaves them as a minor party—for now, at least.
The rise of a xenophobic right-wing party seems somewhat superfluous in Japan, since the country—and the LDP—have been widely viewed as anti-foreigner already. In 2018, then-Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, who represented a paradigm for the party’s conservative wing, told parliament that the government has “no intention of taking a so-called immigration policy.” Even with recent immigration to help fill lower-end jobs, foreigners account for 3 percent of the population, which is among the lowest levels among all countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development and significantly lower than United Sates’ 14 percent. Of these, only about half are permanent residents.
Much of the anger appears to be aimed at the mass influx of foreign tourists, who can be seen in large numbers at popular cities such as Tokyo and Kyoto. This, of course, has nothing to do with immigration but provides a nice hook for Sanseito to talk about the evils of foreigners, who are supposedly buying Japanese land and committing crimes. Sanseito’s main policy points contain the usual range of conspiracy theories and falsehoods of what used to be called the “lunatic fringe” and which threaten to move from the edge to the center of politics. It claims that COVID-19 was staged by pharmaceutical companies, Japan merely sought to liberate other Asian nations during World War II, and globalization has somehow damaged Japan’s export-driven economy.
More palpable to the average Japanese is the still-modest rise in inflation, which is at 2.5-3.5 percent, depending on what components are included. Within this manageable number, however, is a doubling in the retail price for rice—a staple that has a mythical status in Japanese culture.
The rice shortage demonstrates the pitfalls of a planned economy (U.S. President Donald Trump take note), where much of the blame stems from a long-running government program to lower annual rice production as diets changed. With wholesale prices and production fixed by the government, Japan had a growing rice stockpile that became increasingly expensive to manage. This reversed suddenly with hotter weather and the mass retirement of the postwar generation of farmers, leading to a fall in available land for rice production. In response, the government has started to release stockpiles and increased imports to help bring prices down, but progress has been slow.
The return of inflation has been a long-standing goal of the government and the central bank, both of which saw deflationary pressures as dragging the economy down. But as was seen in the United States’ 2024 presidential election, consumers prefer deflation, even though it typically means stagnant wages.
The impact is partly psychological but also measurable. In an inflationary environment, prices go up steadily, while wage increases—even if at the same level—will come more slowly, leading to a “treadmill” feeling that no matter how fast you run, you can never catch up. Data supports this perception, with Japanese workers now seeing real wages (adjusted for inflation) falling for most of the past two years. In May, they fell 2.9 percent below levels from the same month last year.
A rise in wages is also not uniform. While big companies have been able to use some of their higher profits amid a falling yen to push up salaries, the small and medium-sized enterprises that employ 70 percent of Japanese workers have found that they are being squeezed and are hard-pressed to raise wages.
These complaints take on the “megaphone effect” through social media. Sanseito’s economic prescriptions are nebulous and would likely be unworkable, but that does not blunt their popular appeal. Sanseito’s charismatic leader and co-founder, Sohei Kamiya, said that Japan’s economic problems can be solved by having fewer foreign workers and cutting taxes, despite the problems posed by a shrinking Japanese workforce and a debt ratio at more than 230 percent of annual GDP, roughly double the U.S. level.
“People who read newspapers and make their decisions based on that are voting for the traditional parties, and people who are either reading a lot of blogs, reading a lot of social media posts, and looking at a lot of YouTube to make their decisions, they going more toward these anti-establishment parties,” Romeo Marcantuoni, a researcher at Tokyo’s Waseda University who has studied Sanseito’s rise, recently told Reuters.
But Sanseito is not alone in trying to give money away to disgruntled voters. Other parties have also suggested income tax cuts or a reduction in the national consumption tax, which is currently at 10 percent. The LDP, wary of worsening the fiscal debt, has proposed more limited once-time cash payments.
The LDP’s response to its perilous position has been lackluster. Despite calls for a reworking of the party to open decision-making, the focus has instead been on who could replace Ishiba, with the most likely names being the other contenders at the party’s October 2024 election that settled on Ishiba. These include archconservative Sanae Takaichi, Agriculture Minister Shinjiro Koizumi, and former Prime Minister Taro Aso. None would represent a fresh look, and each carries their own problems. Takaichi is seen as too radical and unable to placate the party’s more liberal wing, Koizumi has been lackluster in his role and is best-known for being the son of a former leader, while the 84-year-old Aso is famous for his frequent verbal gaffes.
Ishiba, meanwhile, repeated his stance that he must stay in place after a grueling four-hour July 28 meeting with more than 230 of the LDP’s parliamentary members. In the days since the election, he has been widely called upon to step down but has also picked up some support in opinion polls, making an immediate departure less certain.
Ishiba is also touting the fact that he pulled off a surprise last-minute deal with the United States, a trade agreement that at least limits the damage of tariffs on Japanese exports, especially for auto parts. His opponents have turned that around to say that with the deal now in place, Ishiba can now leave. Gratitude is never a surplus commodity in politics.
None of this resolves the structural issues that the LDP and other established parties in Japan face. “It is not clear if catch-all parties like the LDP can address the emerging social challenges. It may be a spontaneous response of humans to be radicalized when things are not working well,” said Masahiro Mogaki, a political affairs specialist at Keio University’s Economic Observatory. He and other analysts said that the LDP should acknowledge the challenges of inflation, low economic growth, and an aging society, and seek a national consensus for tackling those issues. Whether social media will pay any attention is another question.
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