Sanae Takaichi’s resounding win in Japan’s snap election last month divided Chinese-language commentary. Many Chinese living in the country were uneasy; some beat their chests in despair, declaring they’d pack up and leave. Others – mostly residing outside of Japan – hailed it a triumph for Japanese democracy and an awakening of the Yamato spirit. Such mixed feelings are in part a reaction to Takachi’s hawkishness on Taiwan. Soon after taking over as prime minister last October, she claimed that a Chinese blockade of Taiwan could constitute a ‘survival-threatening situation’ – implying possible military involvement in a cross-strait conflict. Within Japan, her comments helped cement her image as a tough-talking Japanese Thatcher, but they trigged uproar in Beijing, which has restricted rare earth exports and other critical materials. The number of Chinese visitors to Japan has fallen by 61 per cent on the previous year.

This heightened antagonism comes in the context of a broader anti-foreigner mood, one that has played an increasingly prominent part in politics in recent months. During last July’s Senate election, foreigners – comprising just 3 per cent of Japan’s population – were suddenly the hottest topic. Rumours spread like wildfire on social media: cheap immigrant labour was stifling Japanese wage growth and jeopardizing public safety; expat entrepreneurs in Tokyo were receiving low-interest start-up loans of up to ¥15 million; growing numbers were overstaying their visas and exploiting the welfare system; employees of multinational corporations were spreading Covid; crimes committed by foreigners were going unprosecuted. Amid this din, the far-right party Sanseito rapidly gained popularity with its ‘Japanese First’ campaign. It placed third in the election, securing fifteen seats, up from one previously.

This was an early indication of shifting public sentiment, as disaffected and economically insecure voters rallied to watchwords of the xenophobic right. Although Takaichi’s Liberal Democratic Party continues to emphasize ‘coexistence’ with foreign residents and pledges to expand skilled-worker visa programmes – adopting a more pragmatic position than many of the opposition parties – on the campaign trail she made hay of these themes. She repeatedly invoked the so-called ‘Nara deer-kicking incident’, in which footage of a tourist abusing one of the deer that roam Nara Park spread widely on social media, seized on by nationalist commentators as evidence of foreigners’ disregard for Japanese values (deer are a treasured cultural symbol). Takaichi’s appropriation of the furore signalled that her approach to Sanseito’s anti-immigration rhetoric would be, ‘If you can’t beat them, join them’.

Traditional media is struggling to keep up. A week before the Senate election in July, outlets such as the Mainichi Shimbun and Asahi Shimbun ran fact-checking features, while the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare and the Chief Cabinet Secretary held press conferences to debunk misinformation. But it was too little too late. The salience of social media in February’s general election also helps explain the depth of affection Takaichi has inspired among young people. Those in their 20s favour the Prime Minister by a larger margin than those in their 30s, and teens express even greater enthusiasm. Despite being a veteran politician of the establishment – elected to the House of Representatives in the early 1990s, protégée of longest-serving Prime Minister Abe Shinzo and leader of the party that has dominated Japanese politics for seventy years – Takaichi appears to have benefited from the widespread perception that she represents change, and not only means what she says but will be capable of acting on it. ‘She seems like she could actually do something for us’, one young person told reporters. Another suggested Takaichi seems unlike previous prime ministers who ‘would just read prepared scripts handed to them by bureaucrats’.

Another young interviewee said he spent much of his time on YouTube, where Takaichi’s hard-edged persona and ‘Make Japan Strong and Prosperous’ refrain impressed him in campaign ads. Takaichi’s savvy use of social media gave her a hefty advantage in a country where elections have hitherto mostly been fought and decided outside the digital sphere. In 2011, under 10 million – in a country of over 120 million – owned a smartphone, and Twitter (now X) counted under 7 million monthly users. By 2024, the number of smartphones had risen to more than 220 million, and Twitter users had increased tenfold. YouTube’s monthly audience has also surpassed 70 million. One video released by the LDP at the beginning of February garnered 100 million views in little over a week, an achievement much trumpeted by the party (though paid promotion appears to have played a significant role in inflating the LDP’s engagement metrics, reflecting the party’s financial clout as much as its popular appeal). The means of information dissemination and reception have undergone a seismic shift, and the effects are now beginning to show in electoral politics – not least in the form of the rapid rise of upstarts like Sanseito. Another new party, AI engineer and YouTuber Takahiro Anno’s Team Future, managed to capture eleven seats last month despite its tiny size.

There are signs that young people increasingly approach politics as an extension of their social media activities and accordingly view their relationship to political figures as a form of fan culture, with support spreading through a kind of in-crowd contagion (‘You support Takaichi? Me too!’). Takaichi also inspires a distinctly gender-based sympathy. Following the election, the Asahi Shimbun interviewed LDP supporters: ‘As a woman, I want to support her’; ‘I hope she succeeds as the first female prime minister.’ Full-time homemakers and working mothers had reportedly made up a significant fraction of Sanseito’s support in the Senate elections last summer. Many self-identified as apolitical and reported being drawn into politics via sensationalist ‘viral content’ on social media – conspiracies implicating globalist cabals, shadowy pharmaceutical interests and external interference in Japanese affairs.

Clickbait alleging that foreigners have violated Japanese laws or customs, caused traffic accidents or are burdening the public purse can easily earn over a million views. By contrast, content addressing concrete policy or substantive issues struggles to gain traction. Indeed, February’s short campaign season was distinguished by virtually no discussion of the key questions facing the country. In a public sphere distorted by the logic of the attention economy, it scarcely matters that politicians are caught embezzling public funds, that the Unification Church remains entangled in unresolved scandals, that no measures have been taken against soaring prices, or that fiscal policies are weakening the yen. In the absence of any meaningful debate of such issues, voters took up the chant of ‘Takaichi, Takaichi!’ as if at a festival. To cast this apparent shift to a more personalized, online mode of politics as a deterioration of Japanese democracy, or even of the electorate itself, as some observers have, is misleading and moralistic. Nonetheless, the profound implications of these new technologies must be reckoned with.

Of course, Japan’s transformed media ecology is not the whole story. The dissatisfaction with politics-as-usual stems from a long-brewing desire to break with Japan’s ‘lost decades’: the period of prolonged stagnation since the bursting of the asset bubble at the turn of the 1990s. Those entering work in the aftermath found themselves in a sharply contracting labour market that saw large numbers pushed into irregular, temporary or part-time jobs. The cohort most affected by Japan’s employment ‘ice age’ are precisely those who have been most susceptible to anti-immigrant rhetoric. At a series of rallies in Tokyo last year organized by the right-wing influencer Uryu Hirano along with sympathetic local politicians to protest supposedly lax immigration policies, I was struck by the scarcity of young people – attendees were predominantly aged between 30 and 50. The regular employment rate for this ‘ice age’ generation is on average 10 to 20 per cent lower than that of their predecessors and their annual income might be as little as ¥2 million (£9,500) a year in their forties; those with permanent positions may take home triple that.

Japan’s post-bubble trough was punctuated by the global shocks of the dot-com bust and the 2008 financial crisis, and then the devastating Tōhoku earthquake in 2011. ‘Abenomics’ brought a measure of recovery, but it was fragile and uneven, and stalled with the arrival of Covid in 2020. Pandemic disruptions to global supply chains, coupled with the restructuring of production networks and Western efforts at ‘de-risking’, fuelled a burst of inflation. At the same time, quantitative easing began to exact its price in a sharp depreciation of the yen. Property values in Tokyo soared, in some districts doubling or even tripling within a few years.

Against this backdrop, geopolitical friction with Japan’s largest neighbour has aroused a strong sense of antagonism. For those under 50, more than half – if not the entirety – of their lives have been spent in a discursive climate dominated by confrontation with China. Takaichi’s remarks on Taiwan in fact reflect the reality of Japan’s 2015 security legislation, which stipulates that if the United States engages in war and comes under attack, Japan must fulfil its treaty obligations and participate in military countermeasures. China’s portrayal of this as meaning that Japan will deploy troops if anything happens in Taiwan – regardless of US action – served the needs of its domestic propaganda; the subsequent imposition of sanctions targeting tourists, rare earth exports and other sectors has left many in Japan bewildered and indignant. A recent TV audience poll asking whether Sino-Japanese relations should be improved returned a stark verdict: 76 per cent ‘no’.

Surveys conducted by the Cabinet Office of Japan and a Tokyo-based think tank consistently show high levels of negative sentiment towards China, often exceeding 80 per cent. Yet until now such attitudes have rarely translated into a desire to disrupt diplomatic or trade relations. In the past, public opinion tended to be pragmatic in matters of foreign policy. The shift suggests not simply an emotional flare-up but a growing willingness to contemplate severing ties. Faced with Chinese restrictions on critical supplies, rather than give in to pressure the Takaichi Administration moved immediately to secure support from Western allies and began mining seabed silt near Minami-Torishima. This resolute stance resonated with a public increasingly receptive to appeals for economic self-reliance and strategic independence.

Japan’s global ranking by GDP per capita has dropped from around twentieth a decade ago to roughly fortieth today, placing it behind Taiwan and South Korea, its former junior partners in East Asia. New industrial sectors take decades to develop, leaving few viable economic strategies in the short term. How then to manage societal expectations? National security reforms may be the easiest avenue for delivering tangible results. Rapid passage of a tabled Espionage Prevention Act or establishment of Japan’s answer to the CIA – the National Intelligence Agency – may qualify. Similarly, in the run-up to the election, Takaichi’s government announced a package of measures affecting foreign residents, enacted largely through administrative fiat rather than normal legislative channels, earning praise for their rapid implementation.

In view of a potential crisis in the Taiwan Strait, there are several areas where the government could claim achievements: strengthening defence capabilities, further loosening Japan’s legal restrictions on arms exports and expanding international security partnerships. The ultimate prize for the right remains constitutional revision, the foundational premise of their view that Japan should become a ‘normal nation’, by which they mean freed from the pacifist shackles of the post-Second World War settlement, above all Article 9 of the 1947 Constitution. A serious attempt to amend these provisions, however, would likely provoke sharper divisions in Japan than any it has experienced since the end of the war. It would also invite fierce opposition from neighbouring states, starting with China, which might be tempted to intervene to preserve the postwar order. For the Takaichi government, such a direct confrontation would carry obvious risks.

The most pressing challenge, however, remains how to ease economic pressures in a situation of persistently sluggish growth. During the election, both the LDP and several opposition parties proposed a two-year suspension of the consumption tax on foodstuffs. The Ministry of Finance has expressed opposition to the proposal, warning that it could undermine fiscal sustainability and unsettle the yen as well as the bond market. On the night of the LDP’s triumph, a television host Hikari Ōta confronted Takaichi during a live interview: ‘What if the promised consumption-tax exemption proves impossible to implement?’ Takaichi angrily rebuked Ōta for asking a ‘malicious question’ – an exchange that seemed to betray her own uncertainty. Her victory sent the Nikkei index soaring to record highs. Its previous peak was during the asset bubble of the late 1980s; today’s rally might better be described as a political bubble. Should the hopes Takaichi has stirred prove unfounded, a sharp correction cannot be ruled out.

Read on: R. Taggart Murphy, ‘On Shinzo Abe’s Japan’, NLR 93.