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When the minor Sanseito political party rocketed up the polls in the lead-up to a nationwide election in Japan in July, the liberal media in and outside of Japan was stunned. “Xenophobic” was one common slur used by Japan’s fake-news outlets to describe Sanseito and its party leader, the young Kamiya Sohei. “Far-right” was another. Sanseito were the Trumps, the Le Pens, the AfDs of Japan, the Japanese media breathlessly reported.
In America, POLITICO, AP, and many others peddled the same line. The BBC, not to be left out of the frenzy, in turn smeared Sanseito with the “far-right” moniker.
The media’s shock was not a surprise to anyone. Nor was Sanseito’s rise. Sanseito’s slogan for the election was “Japan First,” often reprised as “Japanese First,” a political homage to MAGA and a plea for sanity in Japanese politics. This slogan clearly resonated with voters here. There are way, way too many foreigners in Japan right now. Overtourism is a big problem. Many cities and even small towns in Japan are suffering from ill-mannered visitors.
Many resident foreigners are also troublemakers, except that, unlike tourists, they don’t leave Japan after a week’s vacation. In Kawaguchi, for example, a city in the prefecture of Saitama not far from downtown Tokyo, Kurd squatters have overrun parts of the municipality. Even when major incidents are caused by the apparently lawless Kurds, the police don’t prosecute the offenders.
Ishii Takaaki, an independent journalist who has been virtually alone in covering the damage foreigners are doing in Saitama, has been threatened repeatedly by Kurds and their far-left Japanese supporters. Ishii writes in his 2024 book on the subject that he reported the death threats to the police, but they did nothing and suggested he move. Wada Masamune, a particularly supercilious politician from the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), filed criminal charges against Ishii for reporting on his ties to the trouble. (Wada was voted out of office in July.)
It’s not just the Kurds. The Chinese are buying up huge swaths of land in Japan. Many of the deals are murky, and it’s not clear who really is making the purchases. Many in Japan suspect it’s the Chinese Communist Party or its affiliates.
All in all, many Japanese people can feel their country is being invaded and sold out from under them, and that no one in the government or media is listening to them. Instead, the media and the liberal overlords are busy lecturing the Japanese people about “hate speech” and the dangers of populism.
So, in July, Japanese voters did what any sane electorate would do. They ignored the media, thumbed their noses at the elitist pols, and voted in Sanseito by a landslide.
I reached out to Matsuda Manabu, an acquaintance who was formerly a member of the House of Representatives in Japan and a high-ranking official in the Ministry of Finance. Matsuda, who was elected back into the Diet in July, 2025—this time as a member of the House of Councillors—has long been against globalism and has sought an equal relationship with the United States and other nations based on principles of national interest. He is a founding member of Sanseito.
I started off by asking about Sanseito’s tremendous election success in July. According to an interview with the party leader Kamiya in the newest issue of the conservative monthly newsmagazine Seiron, even Kamiya was surprised at how well Sanseito did.
Sanseito exceeded even the most optimistic expectations in the July elections. How do you assess the election results?
According to some polls, support for Sanseito among the voters is now second only to the LDP. I don’t know how things will progress from here, but the polls also show that it is older voters who still support the LDP. Younger voters who support the LDP are few and far between.
During the election I went around the country, and almost everywhere I went voters were saying the same thing. They’re uneasy with the huge numbers of foreigners coming into Japan and buying up so much land.
There have not been many in postwar Japan who have realized that Japan has become a colony of the United States. But there have recently been so many foreigners in Japan, and so many foreigners buying land here, that the number of people in Japan who are realizing that something is not right with the way things are is steadily increasing.
Is there any connection between overtourism in Japan and spiking rice prices? As the price of a five-kilogram bag of Koshihikari rice has nearly doubled in the past year, some analysts have speculated that the more than 3 million people that Japan temporarily adds to its population in the form of tourists each month may be driving up demand and thereby price for Japan’s staple grain.
I can’t say that there is no link whatsoever between the number of foreigners and the price of rice. However, the most fundamental problem is that we in Japan have not built up a reliable domestic rice supply network.
Sanseito’s platform holds that agriculture is the bedrock of any country’s national security. Surely most countries in the world outlay great sums of money to protect their agricultural industries. However, Japan’s position has been that, in a pinch, we can always just import whatever we need. We’ve come to depend on the United States for part of our food supply and have gotten used to this situation of reliance.
The Japanese government takes the position, from a public finance standpoint, that it costs a lot of money to protect agriculture. So, what the government has done is to make the price of rice artificially high by suppressing rice production. The government has done this by curtailing the number of acres that farmers can cultivate, thereby throttling rice yields. But all this has done, in the long run, is to undermine the ability of the country to supply its people with rice, and to force the Japanese people to pay a high price for the rice that is allowed to be produced. This is an entirely mistaken policy.
Our stance in Sanseito is that agriculture is not an industry that should be left to the mercy of the market, but that the government should do everything it can to protect agriculture. We have even said that farmers should be appointed as public officials as need arises. Sanseito has been saying these things for some time, and it has, I think, contributed to our increasing successes in elections.
Japan is blessed with good soil, a beautiful natural environment where humans can raise good and delicious foodstuffs. Down the ages, our ancestors have worked in this environment and built the country that we have today. From the Edo period, the Japanese people have understood that farming is hard work requiring a wide range of skills. It takes a long time to learn how to do the work of agriculture. We need, as a country, to spend the money it takes to support those doing agricultural work.
We want young people in Japan to awaken to the value of Japan’s natural blessings, to understand that Japanese food is something wonderful to be cherished. We are working tirelessly on this front. There are more and more young people who are discovering that agriculture is a job worth doing. We need to support these young people who want to make farming their career.
So, the trajectory is small-scale farming?
Some in Japan are calling for industrial-scale agriculture, like in the United States and Australia. But we will never be able to compete with those countries in industrial-scale agriculture, so small farmers are where we must focus our support. Communities—this is our strength as a nation.
The main point is that we, as a country, have not done the things we need to do to be an independent nation. And when we in Sanseito pointed this out, a lot of people in Japan understood and agreed with us.
As you were speaking about government support for agriculture, I was thinking back to the prime ministership of Koizumi Junichiro [father of current Minister of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries Koizumi Shinjiro]. Under Koizumi pere, the Japanese government introduced wide-scale privatization of industry and market-principle reforms. These led, eventually, to the dissolution of many community bonds and the sacrificing of Japanese industry to globalization.
We used to have communities inside of each industry. Those were broken up by globalism, by globalists in the Japanese government. These are the forces against which we in Sanseito are fighting. People here at first thought this was a conspiracy theory, but people have stopped saying this as much and are now realizing that Japanese industry has been hollowed out by globalists.
Has this change in the thinking of the Japanese voter paralleled the ending of the Cold War mentality here and the breakdown of old left–right political divisions?
The prevailing paradigm which the Japanese ruling establishment has embraced has been capitalists versus workers. It was in the context of this paradigm that we traditionally thought of left and right in politics. But what has changed now is that this paradigm has largely collapsed, and we see that it is each individual Japanese person versus the establishment that is the real paradigm. The paradigm’s axis has shifted.
Please speak a bit about Saya [Shioiri Sayaka], the singer-turned-politician who, like you, won a Diet seat for Sanseito in the July election. Shortly before the election, she did an interview with Sputnik, a Russian state media outlet, and was immediately, and ridiculously, denounced in the Japanese media as a Russian asset. This seemed exactly the playbook that the American fake-news media used against Trump and those close to him during the long years of the Russia hoax.
There is a bit of a back story to this. When the Ukraine war broke out in 2022, Sanseito’s position was that Russia was not entirely to blame, but that both Russia and Ukraine shared responsibility for the way things had developed. Sanseito argued that naive accusations about Russia’s being 100 percent at fault would not help get to the bottom of why the war had started, and that it would behoove Japan to learn more about the situation in order to work toward peace in the future.
We were immediately denounced then as Russian agents. But we are not for Russia and are not for Ukraine. We are for Japan. We want to learn facts and apply those toward helping our country. The Japanese media don’t think, they simply spread propaganda, especially when it comes to wars. This doesn’t benefit Japan at all.
The 80th anniversary of the end of the Second World War was in August, so that has been much on the minds of people in Japan, as well, it seems.
Much the same can be said about the war Japan fought with the United States as about the Ukraine–Russia war going on now. Japan bears much of the blame for that war with America and we have reflected and tried to learn from our mistakes. But it simply isn’t true, isn’t historically accurate, to say that 100 percent of the blame lies with Tokyo. President Franklin D. Roosevelt was certainly not blameless in the run-up to the war, for instance.
Looking at history objectively, without partisanship, is another of the major initiatives of Sanseito. I understand that many in Washington today may find such historical truths inconvenient, but we think it is important to tell the truth no matter who doesn’t want to hear it. Studying history together, Japanese and Americans, is one way, we think, to bring peace into the world.
Another uproar surrounding the Sanseito candidate (and now legislator) Saya came when she made an offhand remark about the possibility of Japan’s having nuclear weapons. This has become a much more widely accepted prospect these past few years, especially as the Ukraine war and Washington’s withdrawal from Afghanistan have rattled Japan’s once rock-solid faith in its alliance with America. In the context of Saya’s remarks, can you speak more broadly about U.S. bases in Japan and Japan’s national security?
We need to look into developing and maintaining deterrence capabilities against a nuclear attack—although I am not saying that Japan should do this today–to be able to defend Japan from the nuclear threats posed by other countries. There is an appalling lack of debate in Japan about nuclear weapons. Almost no one in the public sphere, almost no politicians in the Diet, are having this discussion. But we must have it. We have to envision a future, independent, self-reliant Japan and work to achieve it.
About the security situation more broadly, President Trump is probably very much concerned with how to counter the People’s Republic of China. He also seems to want Japan to step up and play a bigger role in this regard instead of simply relying on the United States for protection. At the present time, the U.S.–Japan alliance is very important. For instance, if war were to break out over the island of Taiwan then Japan would probably be drawn into the conflict, so we need the United States to help with our national security.
In the longer term, however, we in Sanseito think it is a mistake to believe that the United States will go on being involved in providing security guarantees in East Asia forever.
Italy, Germany, and Japan were on the losing side in the Second World War, but even compared to Italy and Germany, Japan hosts many U.S. military bases and is less independent than those two European countries. There are many aspects in which the U.S. can operate with impunity in Japan. I think we in Japan must find a way to address this problem.
However, in the long run, it seems that the United States will likely gradually pull its forces out of Japan. If this is the natural course of things in the long term, then we must accept this fact and begin to think proactively, now, about how we in Japan can protect our own country by ourselves.
We should be ready, for example, to have the Jieitai [Japan Self-Defense Forces] take over the management of some bases and other facilities from the United States.
Likewise, the U.S.–Japan Status of Forces Agreement is humiliating for Japan, but, again, if the United States military is going to gradually pull back from Japan, then instead of complaining about the Agreement, or about the U.S. bases in Japan, it is better for us in Japan to start planning for our own self-defense. I think that is where our time and effort are better directed. It is a matter of common sense for a country to defend itself.
The power of the United States is also declining relative to other states. How is Japan going to chart a course in a new global order?
Military analysts have been speaking lately about how difficult it is to intercept the hypersonic missiles being developed by Russia, and about how the United States is going to have to work hard to defend its home territory from such missiles. President Trump has been speaking about concentrating resources on creating a Golden Dome for America, for example.
The United States has intervened militarily in any number of places since the end of the Cold War, but it seems that, because of technological advances and other factors, the U.S. will steadily find itself unable to maintain a worldwide base network and defend its homeland simultaneously. If that is true, then it seems to follow that Washington will pull its forces out of Japan as well as South Korea and deploy its forces closer to home. The risk of keeping forces forward-deployed in hotspot areas like East Asia will likely become too great for the U.S. military to continue to justify. From a cost-benefit analysis standpoint, the prevailing defense arrangement will become untenable for Washington.
We have to be able to read this writing on the wall and be ready to adapt. If Washington comes to Tokyo demanding that we act commonsensically and defend our own country, then we have to be ready to take them up on the offer without hesitation. We have to develop defense technology now to allow us to meet the Americans halfway when the time comes.
President Donald Trump’s recent Alaska meeting with Russia’s President Vladimir Putin is also in the background to all this. How do you see Japan’s role in the world given apparently thawing Washington-Moscow relations?
There is no need to unnecessarily antagonize our neighbors, including Russia. Japanese politicians have gotten swept up in whatever the G7 countries are saying and have lost sight of the national interests of Japan. President Trump is working to build a better relationship with Russia. Does it serve our own national interests to go on shouting that Russia is our enemy when the United States is improving its relations with Moscow? We have to be pragmatic, realistic, and take a hard look at what is best for us as a country.
President Trump has used tariffs as a bargaining chip with Japan. The tariffs have been in the news constantly here. What are your views on how the current government in Tokyo has dealt with the tariff issue?
We in Sanseito were against the Biden globalist administration. While we don’t agree completely with everything the Trump administration does, we understand that President Trump is fighting globalism, and we support that fight. Globalism is the enemy. We want more allies in the fight against it.
We want to have good relations with the Trump Administration. Trump has driven a hard bargain in the tariff negotiations. That’s true, and I think we need to do a better job standing up for ourselves. Trump wants Japan to invest in America, but we want Japan to use that money to invest in Japan, to help our country.
At the same time, President Trump probably doesn’t much trust Prime Minister Ishiba Shigeru. We think that if the current Ishiba administration had spent less time kissing up to the Chinese communists and more time working on the relationship with Trump, then the tariffs situation would not have escalated to the level it has.
Prime Minister Ishiba has refused to step down from power, despite the LDP’s devastating loss in the July elections. Do you have any closing thoughts on Ishiba and his LDP?
Prime Minister Ishiba says that Sanseito is a populist phenomenon. But what we are saying is that we want to protect the Japanese people, everyone. It’s just a matter of common sense that people in a given country should want to protect their country and do what is best for it and its citizens.
In any event, it is the younger generation that overwhelmingly is supporting Sanseito and other emerging parties. In 10 or 15 years, the LDP may not even exist any longer if things keep going as they are.
As for us, we want a strong Japan, a prosperous Japan. We want this to be able to better contribute to the prosperity of the world. We seek independence, not isolation. We want better relations with America and other countries. We want what’s best for Japan so we can stand up on our own two feet in the community of nations.