The Japanese leader’s election gambit, fueled by the power of her personality and some unlikely help from young voters consumed by “Sanamania,” appears to have paid off.
Japan’s conservative prime minister Sanae Takaichi has won a landslide victory after she gambled on a high-stakes snap election.
Takaichi, who took office in October after being elected leader of the governing Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), surpassed the 310 seats needed for a supermajority in the 465-seat lower house, Japanese public broadcaster NHK reported from the official election count on Sunday evening. The supermajority allows her ruling coalition to override the upper house, where it lacks a majority.
An NHK exit poll as voting ended earlier on Sunday projected the LDP would win between 274 and 326 seats. The party and its coalition partner Ishin were projected to win a combined 302-366 seats, as voters turned out amid freezing temperatures in a rare winter election.
She wasn’t gambling. This wasn’t a huge risk. Big news outlets have become dinosaurs struggling to understand a new world. Her team calculated this win using modern viral social media strategies and polling metrics. It’s not just gEnZ that is swayed by social media. Wake up NBCeeple; the Trump virus hath spread.
I know little more from Japan than the mainstream culture knowledge. That said, Japan is said to be a place where people are cold and distant. So, things starting getting more social, they get more tourists, and then instead of relaxing in relation to the social sphere, Japan is like: “No, let’s be more cold and distant.”. Yeah, that will work.
I don’t think that’s exactly right as someone in Japan for more than a decade now.
Overtourism is a separate problem. With the yen weakening compared to other currencies, it made things more affordable. A lot of the tourist industry also collapsed around Corona and the strict (to those external) lockdowns here. That meant there also were fewer accommodations, tourism staff, etc. here. This compounded the problems.
With Corona also came increased prices of a lot of goods and salaries were largely staying stagnant. Having a bunch of extra people buying things up on the cheap yen also meant those things were harder to get for locals. Add to this the JA (basically an ag cartel) and bad weather causing bad rice harvests and people can’t even get the staple that has defined Japanese life for centuries. There’s a lot of simmering anger there. The additional influx of tourists also means that Japanese can’t even travel domestically as cheaply. Hotel prices in some areas have more than doubled since corona and peoples’ salaries have not.
There’s a whole lot going on. I could add a ton of (often illegal) short-term rentals (think Air BnB or similar) pricing people out, foreign (largely Chinese) investors buying land and buildings pricing out the locals is also causing issues. A lot of this boils over to stronger anti-foreigner sentiment that was a real hit in the last election last year and somewhat carried forward this year.
The LDP’s former coalition partner broke off with their rightward turned and formed a new party combining with the main opposition. This meant the main opposition party shifted to the right and also now had ties to Sokka Gakkai which also made them unpalatable to at least some voters. Allegedly, there’s still Moonie money and involvement in the LDP, but I haven’t followed that news much. The LDP’s rightward shift, though, did pick up those tired of the “foreigner issues” (lovely that they rarely distinguish actual residents from tourists, innit) voters who went to other parties. I’ll certainly shed no tears for the more racist parties losing seats, but this is still worrying overall.
Team Mirai, a new party of young people, did pick up votes. They claim to aim for transparency and come from mostly IT backgrounds. The worry here is they’re a bit too into the Dodge type of thing in the US, that they may be very tech-bro types, and they want to use AI for stuff. I don’t know yet. I am no fan of AI and certainly don’t want Dodge tech-bro bullshit coming in. Who knows.
I can’t vote as a non-citizen anyway. If things get bad, I’ll just have to uproot my whole life and move again, but I certainly hope it never gets there.
Terrible but expected news.
Hmm, I just realized that I (an American living in New Zealand) have no idea what Japanese politics are like. To Wikipedia!
Takaichi has been described as holding hard-line conservative and Japanese nationalist views,
uh oh
citing former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher as a role model and deeply influential on her personal political beliefs.
Uh oh
Like Thatcher, she is called the “Iron Lady”.
Uh Oh
Takaichi is a member of Nippon Kaigi, a far-right ultraconservative organisation
UH OH
that argues for a reinterpretation of Japanese history
RED ALERT
amongst ultranationalist lines.
WELP
Oof. Well, I guess it had to happen to Japan someday. It’s happened everywhere else. Here’s hoping it doesn’t last long and the damage is minimal.
It more accurately happens like every second or third PM and then things swing to another faction of the LDP (or, historically rarely since WWII ended, another party though the last times that happened they faceplanted pretty quickly and it went back to the LDP)
Hey look at it this way, we may finally get our mechs out of this.
I mean, they may be the last thing you see, but at least we may see them.
Maybe Japan gets a situation like NZ where the conservitve parties and “the right” like National and Act would probably be left of the USA Democrats on the political spectrum. I can hope right?
Also reducing all politics to a left right thing is so stupid and probably the worst thing to do for political discourse but… here we are. I blame the murdoch media
Unfortunately not. Japan has been very far-right (bordering on jingoistic) for a long time now. The country’s external facade is all cute anime characters and zany fashion… But that was an intentional rebrand (heavily subsidized by the country’s propaganda department) in the wake of WW2 to distance itself from the atrocities they had committed. But internally, the country has remained extremely hardline conservative and xenophobic. And it has only shifted farther right with recent elections.
Voters: Living expenses are too high, yen is weak and imports are expensive, we are suffering
Also voters: Let’s make the status quo stronger
she’s the anti-status quo candidate. it’s just she will move the country even move to the right.
Anti-status quo in rhetoric doesn’t mean they are in reality.
By making it more corrupt and less affordable. All these fascists are the same
we’re all so fucked. ppl are morons.
reptile brains arent evolved for the power of algorithm propaganda. yes we are fucked by the right, but its only temporary until clinate change decimates everything.
Oh, thank goodness. Right wrong hell until mad Max times.
May you live in interesting times…
Bruh
Takaichi is known for favouring proactive government spending. She supports heavy government investment in critical strategic sectors in what she refers to as “crisis management investment”. These include artificial intelligence, semiconductors, nuclear fusion, biotechnology, and defence.
Her other policies aside, the economic one looks like a winner.
I’m sure the shareholders will be happy.
Yeah, you’re probably right. Just looked at unionization rate and it’s around 16%. Workers won’t see much from this investment.
Funny exerpt from wiki:
In the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, the U.S. Occupation authorities initially encouraged the formation of independent unions, but reversed course as part of broader anti-Communist measures.
The cold war era propaganda and policies have really fucked everything up. There’s a straight line between them and today’s Republican/MAGA party that runs right through Reagan’s economic policies. MAGA sits at the crossroads of that and the festering racism that was never dealt with following the civil war. Unfortunately America’s world police mentality (and CIA fuckery, another result of the cold war) has spread those policies and attitudes to a bunch of other countries (who all for some strange reason have a dominant conservative media company owned by Rupert Murdoch, but I’m sure that’s just a coincidence right?).
Japan has struggled with horrendous xenophobia for pretty much their entire history so this isn’t really surprising even if it is disappointing. Unfortunately we’re seeing a rise in far right parties around the globe and there are depressingly few liberal governments left. If this keeps up it’s not going to take much to ignite WW3 with all these nationalists taking control.
Completely agree. A lot of countries were on some path or another of dealing with liberal capitalism’s collapse that gave us The Great Depression. The propaganda you mention steered these changes right back to the right - towards oligarch class dominance over working people, like it used to be before the depression. Unsurprisingly we find ourselves in a situation very reminiscent to the pre-depression environment.
She looks like a traditional japanese mask and that worries me.
