Ahead of​ last year’s elections to the upper house of the Japanese parliament, Sanseito, a new party of the populist right, ran a ‘Japanese First’ campaign attacking foreign residents and tourists as well as the country’s establishment, which it accused of failing to defend Japan’s borders and interests. Sanseito has a charismatic frontman, Kamiya Sohei, a former schoolteacher and shopkeeper who made his name peddling conspiracy theories on YouTube during the Covid pandemic. He shares with his Western populist counterparts a rejection of ‘globalism’, while having a more plausible claim than Trump or Farage to stand outside of the elite.

Sanseito’s manifesto promises economic security, social cohesion and the promotion of a single cultural identity. It has young supporters as well as old: voters aged between 18 and 39 helped the party increase its representation in the upper house from one seat to fifteen. Pinning economic woes on migrants and complacent politicians proved to be a successful strategy. One of the big tasks for Takaichi Sanae, who became Japan’s first female prime minister in October, is to win back some of those voters for her centre-right Liberal Democratic Party (LDP).

Last month she decided to test her strong performance in the polls by calling a snap election on 8 February to Japan’s lower, more powerful house (loosely equivalent to the House of Commons, although in Japan both houses are elected). Takaichi hopes to regain her party’s lost majority, but the obstacles are formidable. Along with the populist right, she will face a new centrist party made up of members of the opposition Constitutional Democratic Party and the LDP’s former coalition partner, Komeito. Taken together, these two parties won 172 seats at the lower house elections in 2024, compared with 191 for the LDP. It is certain to be a tight race.

Much has been made in the press of Takaichi’s colourful past. She used to ride motorbikes and play drums in a heavy metal band; photographs of her at the drum kit alongside the South Korean president recently went viral. But perhaps more attention should be paid to her membership of Nippon Kaigi (Japan Conference), Japan’s most influential conservative organisation, which has strong connections to politics, business and academia. The peak of its influence came with the record-breaking premiership of Shinzo Abe, between 2012 and 2020. Japanese left-liberals fear that Takaichi will follow in the footsteps of her former mentor and further advance the group’s agenda.

Nippon Kaigi is less concerned with contemporary global affairs than with the Allied occupation of Japan, which began eighty years ago last autumn. Most Western and liberal Japanese historians regard the occupation as having helped Japan to recover and modernise after the war. A new constitution placed sovereignty with the people rather than the emperor. A number of civil liberties were established, from freedom of speech and religion to the right of workers to go on strike. Women gained the vote. Land redistribution turned tenants into owners. Education was reformed to focus on the flourishing of the child rather than the ideological interests or pragmatic needs of the state. War was renounced as a means of advancing the national interest.

Conservatives in Japan take a different view. As they see it, after the shooting and bombing stopped in the summer of 1945, the US declared a culture war on Japan, attempting to remake the country in the image of New Deal America. This revisionist critique was sketched out during the Tokyo Trials, which ran from April 1946 to November 1948. The wartime ideologue Ishiwara Kanji, called as a witness, argued against the tribunal’s self-serving mandate of investigating events only from 1928 onwards. The causes of the war should be sought, he argued, in the gunboat diplomacy of Commodore Matthew C. Perry in 1853. Perry’s demand that Japan open its doors to friendship with the United States, made with the backing of enough seaborne firepower to flatten Edo, led slowly but inexorably to the events of 1941. Japan’s wartime prime minister, Tojo Hideki, on trial for his life, suggested starting with the Opium Wars of the mid-19th century – such, he claimed, was the role of British imperialism in shaping the region.

Radhabinod Pal, the only judge at the Tokyo Trials who held that all the accused should be acquitted, became something of a cult hero among Japanese conservatives for pointing out the element of victor’s justice in the proceedings. Pal recognised this, they argued, because his home country, India, had long been subject to colonial exploitation and hypocritical bluster about ‘civilisation’: Japan’s wartime objective had been to rescue Asian countries from such treatment. Yet it was forced to accept the first constitution ever imposed by one nation on another, along with America’s version of the recent past, the humiliation of the imperial family and injurious limits on self-defence. The traditional Japanese family was undermined by the new rights accorded to women, from divorce to property, and moral instruction of the next generation was compromised by the diminishment of state control over the education system (local education boards were given far greater autonomy).

Japanese conservatives have been resisting these impositions since the end of the occupation in April 1952. They have scored some notable successes in recent years, including the reinstatement during Abe’s second term of moral education (including patriotism) in schools and the introduction of a broader range of history textbooks. This was seen as crucial because details of key 20th-century events are still disputed: the coercion of women working in military brothels, for example, and the number of civilians murdered during the capture of Nanjing in 1937-38. The big prize for the right would be a revision of the postwar constitution, in particular changes to strengthen the official standing of the Japanese Self-Defence Forces. Takaichi is in favour of revising the constitution, but she would need a strong parliamentary majority to navigate the lengthy and contentious process.

Foreign residents of Japan often encounter this conservative – some would say ultraconservative – view of the recent past. Twentieth-century history is rarely an easy topic of conversation. A Japanese friend of mine who works as a teacher once told me that his colleagues stretched out the syllabus so the end of term would arrive before they reached the 1930s. There is always a good chance in city centres of encountering right-wing groups patrolling the streets in their gaisensha, black vans decorated with nationalist slogans and wartime flags, blasting martial music and speeches denouncing spineless domestic politicians and Western self-interest. Japanese pedestrians usually ignore them, which I interpreted as a sign either of embarrassment or lack of interest. But much of the gaisensha rhetoric and the broader conservative agenda has resurfaced in Sanseito’s populism. The party wants to rewrite the constitution, restore the emperor’s sovereignty and put an end to pacifism. It seeks patriotic controls on education and the media and, on at least one occasion, has barred a critical journalist from attending its events.

Japan faces serious challenges that even its pragmatic leaders – including Takaichi’s centre-right predecessor, Ishiba Shigeru – have struggled to address. The economy has never fully recovered from the downturn of the early 1990s and the population is decreasing so rapidly that Japan will soon start to lose a million people every year. These problems exacerbate each other. It’s hard to boost productivity when labour is in short supply and essential sectors are struggling for candidates (there is only one applicant for every four nursing jobs). But how do you persuade young Japanese to start families and produce the workers and taxpayers of tomorrow when their present prospects look so bleak?

Immigration was once considered part of the solution. Successive governments welcomed workers from Korea, the Philippines and Vietnam while reassuring the public that they didn’t intend a dramatic increase in overall numbers. The foreign resident population now stands at around 3.8 million (roughly 3 per cent of the population) and will have to become much larger if Japan’s labour shortages persist. But survey after survey has shown that few Japanese are convinced of the benefits of immigration, and while foreign residents might be accepted in certain professional contexts (business, academia), elsewhere ambivalence shades into caution, anxiety and outright antipathy. Working in a Japanese company or renting an apartment as a foreigner can be difficult; convincing the parents of a Japanese girlfriend or boyfriend that you’re relationship material is harder still.

Sometimes it is simply a matter of unfamiliarity. The language barrier is significant and relatively few Japanese travel abroad for any length of time. Yet it would be naive not to acknowledge that in common with other peoples around the world, many Japanese assume a hierarchy of foreignness, with white Westerners near the top. Last year, an ‘Africa Hometown Initiative’, intended to establish educational and cultural exchange between four Japanese municipalities and four African countries (Nigeria, Ghana, Tanzania and Mozambique), had to be cancelled after it was characterised online as a new migration route into Japan, prompting a huge backlash.

Anti-China sentiment is strong and some right-wingers contend that a proportion of Chinese residents of Japan are part of a Communist Party effort to subvert the country from within. They worry especially about foreign ownership of land and resources. Others claim that crimes by foreigners go under-reported because the police are unwilling to risk diplomatic trouble by arresting non-Japanese people. The result, so the argument goes, is that Japan has become a ‘paradise for foreigners’ while ordinary citizens struggle with high taxes and low wage-growth. Social media platforms regularly broadcast footage of meiwaku gaikokujin – nuisance foreigners – shouting at train staff, riding around on the backs of bin lorries and playing loud music or performing dance routines in public. Among the most infamous videos are one of a Chilean influencer doing pull-ups on a Shinto shrine gate and another of a YouTuber tossing a coin to decide whether to consume a can of drink left by a grave as an offering (he did).

These videos often become television fodder, treated to theatrical gasps and sighs of disapproval from tarento (celebrities). Social media creators splice together footage of migrants or tourists with images of graffiti or rubbish – including bags left out by businesses for kerbside collection – in an effort to tap into the decline-porn trend. Comments on these posts suggest that European countries are being destroyed by a combination of post-colonial guilt, mass migration and political cowardice, and urge Japan to act quickly or else join that unhappy club.

In a country still characterised by high levels of politeness and self-restraint, it doesn’t take much for foreigners to cause upset, especially if people have been primed to expect disrespect. The sheer numbers of visitors is itself becoming a problem. A record 42.7 million people travelled to Japan in 2025, with British tourists apparently the highest spenders. The Ministry of Justice announced last year that it is considering a nationwide survey of online hate speech against foreign residents and visitors.

Assuming she remains prime minister after this month’s election, Takaichi will focus on the immediate economic challenges facing Japan: high taxes, inflation, low wages and the cost of living. But at some point she will have to contend with what it means to be Japanese in the 21st century. Abe tried to do this in 2006. In a book called Towards a Beautiful Country, he rejected the old view of Japanese identity as rooted in ethnicity (minzokushugi) and urged civic nationalism (kokuminshugi) in its place – a civic nationalism focused on the developments of the postwar period and the need to roll them back.

Takaichi likes to invoke Margaret Thatcher, but the more interesting comparison is with another female prime minister: Giorgia Meloni. The two women have much in common: modest backgrounds, social conservatism, an authoritarian streak, pragmatism in power. Italy, like Japan, faces labour shortages, an ageing population, a proud set of cultural traditions and deep ambivalence about immigration. Meloni has tried to tackle this by articulating a vision of national identity premised less on blood – a departure from her previously expressed views – than on continuity with the past and a robust sense of what the future ought to look like. Whether Takaichi will have the opportunity to forge a similar vision for Japan depends on the results of the election and the coalition deal-making that will almost certainly ensue. Much will depend on whether her impressive personal approval ratings translate into lower house seats for her less popular party. Should she end up going the way of many Japanese prime ministers, condemned by circumstances to little more than a year in power, Takaichi will lose her chance to tackle the big questions – unanswered, according to her allies, since 1945 – about Japan’s identity and purpose in the world.