Not Just Another Far Right: Understanding Japan’s Sanseito

We can only understand the origins of Sanseito (参政党) by looking at Shinzo Abe. With him, Japanese politics began a radical transformation. Personalisation—a common trend in Western democracies, often marked by weaker institutions and stronger individual figures—started to take root in Japan. Abe personalised Japan’s national direction through “Abenomics”, a mix of monetary easing, fiscal stimulus, and structural reform, and recast the political narrative around identity, tradition, and strength. This marked a major shift away from consensus-based Japanese politics toward a model centred on a strong individual leader (Liff & Lipscy).

Abe consolidated the values and strategies that Sanseito now channels: a hardline stance on national identity, historical revisionism, and territorial defence. Traditionally, Japan’s mainstream conservatism, including Abe’s LDP, has long projected caution and institutional continuity. But Abe pushed the overton window to the right, especially on questions of memory and nationalism. His repeated visits to Yasukuni Shrine, honouring Japan’s war dead (including convicted war criminals), sent a deliberate message to nationalist and far-right audiences. He also promoted revisions of school textbooks and challenged Japan’s responsibility for wartime atrocities like the "comfort women" system, thereby courting support from ultranationalist groups. 

These actions helped normalise nationalist discourse within the mainstream and created the ideological space that new actors like Sanseito would later occupy. 

“Japanese politics is about factions,” a professor told me when I first arrived in Tokyo to study. And for a long time, that was true. But the ideological space Abe carved out has remained largely unfilled under his successors Suga, Kishida, and Ishiba.The latter now finds himself in a difficult position—confronting discontent not only from liberals and the far right, but from within his own party.

This ideological realignment coincides with Japan’s growing demographic and economic challenges. An aging population, declining birthrates, and chronic labor shortages have forced Japan to cautiously open its doors to foreign workers. This has created a profound contradiction: the country relies on immigrants to sustain its economy but resists multiculturalism. Into that tension steps Sanseito, offering a nativist narrative that casts foreigners as a cultural threat, even while quietly accepting their economic necessity. 

Founded in 2020, Sanseito has mastered the digital political battlefield. Unlike traditional parties, it operates fluently on platforms like LINE, Discord, YouTube, and TikTok. Its leaders understand that algorithm-friendly, emotional content—clean, simplified, and seemingly apolitical—carries farther than manifestos or policy proposals. The result is a carefully curated digital nationalism that avoids overt toxicity while subtly radicalising its audience. These platforms do more than amplify content, they create community. 

Through LINE groups, Discord servers, and interactive YouTube streams, Sanseito offers direct participation and a sense of belonging. Its blend of wellness rhetoric, spiritual tones, and political messaging resonates deeply with those who feel ignored or alienated by establishment politics.

Japan’s long history of cultural insularity, as well as a deep sense of civilisational uniqueness (nihonjinron), makes it fertile ground for such messaging. But Sanseito is not simply a Japanese version of Trump’s MAGA movement or Europe’s anti-immigrant parties. 

Illustration by Will Allen/Europinion

The global rise of the far right can obscure the heterogeneity within (Bonikowski). Some movements are protectionist, others neoliberal. Some focus on immigration; others on gender norms, family structures, or religious identity. In Japan, nationalism is not rooted in colonial backlash or refugee anxiety, but in a nostalgia for lost grandeur, a longing for the Meiji era, imperial pride, and spiritual cohesion.

Sanseito blends this historical memory with a forward-looking promise: a Japan that is independent, pure, and spiritually restored.

Its appeal spans generations. It has gained traction among young digital natives—but it also speaks powerfully to Japan’s “ice age generation” (ロスジェネ): those who came of age during the post-bubble “lost decades” of the 1990s and 2000s. Many were locked out of stable employment, home ownership, and traditional life milestones. Long overlooked by mainstream politics, they represent a floating, frustrated demographic.

Sanseito gives them more than an ideological heading and ballot box to tick. It offers recognition, meaning, and identity. 

Sanseito thrives not only by invoking a glorious past but by offering a compelling present: a sense of control, clarity, and national agency. In a political landscape dominated by technocratic stasis and vague reformist rhetoric, the far right stands out for offering emotional certainty and a call to action.

The lack of tradition in emergent Japanese parties may be insoluble, but the lack of agency is not. The far right in Japan has understood this.

Illustrations by Will Allen/Europinion