“Different country, same problems.” That was a subheading to our Liberty Nation News June 1 article on the persistent rise of populism in Europe. Yet credentialed “observers” and an alarmed big-box media are expressing surprise that yet another nation in the modern world is seeing a nationalist surge brought about by the same tensions that have rocked the progressive ruling establishment on the Old Continent. In the Far East, Japan is turning against globalism and its signature calling card: rapid demographic change via massive immigration.
Here we go again.
“The fringe far-right Sanseito party emerged as one of the biggest winners in Japan’s upper house election on [July 20], gaining support with warnings of a ‘silent invasion’ of immigrants, and pledges for tax cuts and welfare spending,” rattled wire service Reuters reported as Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba’s Liberal Democratic Party and its coalition partner Komeito lost its majority in the nation’s upper house. The fresh defeat follows in the wake of a similar lower house electoral disaster in October.
“Far-right Sanseito party wins shock electoral gains in Japan on anti-foreigner platform,” Australian Broadcasting Corporation exclaimed. “Analysts say Sanseito’s rise has exposed long-simmering public anxiety about rising costs, over-tourism, and a stagnant economy – all of which the party blames on foreigners,” the Aussie state broadcaster writes.
Gee, how did it ever get to this point? An out-of-touch entrenched political party pushes manifestly unpopular social policies and then is surprised to see a populist reaction. Sound familiar?
“The Liberal Democratic Party has held power in Japan for 65 of the 69 years since the party’s founding in 1955,” Pew Research Center related in October. Talk about your Uniparty. But the Japanese people have been turned off by a widespread corruption scandal in the party along with the country’s struggling economy and looming demographic crisis.
“Most Japanese adults (56%) say they do not feel close to any political party. This is far higher than the share of adults who do not identify with any political party in other countries surveyed,” Pew reported of a poll it took last year. “Indeed, only 21% of Japanese adults say they support the LDP on a regular basis.”
That’s step one. There is a step two.
Sanseito leader Sohei Kamiya asserted at a recent rally that “under globalism, multinational companies have changed Japan’s policies for their own purposes,” ABC Australia states.
As has been seen repeatedly in nation after nation throughout the West, promises of a golden economic age are the carrot dangled before citizens in the push for massive immigration. Ireland’s Celtic Tiger boondoggle of the late 1990s and early 2000s is the classic example. A quarter century later, that unfortunate island is on the brink of civil war due to its festering migrant crisis.
Visions of a new and glorious Rising Sun Tiger have been similarly sold to Japanese for more than a decade now. And, naturally, there is only way to make it happen.
“Shigeru Ishiba, who is in charge of revitalizing regional economies, said Japan should accept more immigrants, and pointed to the acceptance of Japanese migrants in South America early last century as proof that integration can work,” UK dominant establishment newspaper The Guardian reported in 2015. “Given that Japan’s population is in decline, the government should promote policies that accept immigrants into Japan,” the future prime minister asserted. “It is wrong thinking that foreigners must not come to Japan.”
This is how you get to become the head of a political party that has ruled for 65 out of 69 years.
Then there is that big business boogeyman. Surely an exaggeration by far-right rabble rousers?
In 2024, French wire service Agence France-Presse platformed the pleadings of an India-born CEO of “one of Japan’s most famous snack brands” that the nation fully embrace massive immigration as a key facet of a necessary globalist alignment.
“The country ‘has no choice’ but to allow in more immigrants, said [Lekh] Juneja, 72, who first came to Japan in 1984 and previously worked for a food ingredients maker and a pharmaceuticals firm,” AFP reported. “It’s not only the numbers. It’s also the mindset, the culture. We have to go global.”
Juneja’s Kameda Seika rice cracker company generated about $700 million in revenue in 2024.
This is the rocket fuel for Sanseito’s populist flight. Juneja is the physical manifestation of what the nascent party means when it decries a multinational corporate menace hovering over Japan.
“Since joining the firm Juneja has been trying to make Kameda more international,” AFP writes. “(If we employ people) who only speak and write Japanese we have very limited resources, very limited choices,” he told the news agency. Less Japanese employees at one of Japan’s culturally iconic corporations. How nice. This powerful CEO is openly declaring his adopted country must be transformed.
“I think Japan has to change,” he continued. “We are proud (in Japan) of our backgrounds. But I think flexibility and having people from overseas would be very critical for Japan.”
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It’s hard to refute Sanseito’s claims that multinational corporations are revamping the country at the expense of Japanese citizens when the CEO of one of the country’s leading companies is calling for it so publicly.
And so it goes. As an arrogant moneyed establishment continues to wage a not so cold social and economic war against the general public, the populist wave sweeping over nation after nation will only expand in intensity and depth.