If the morning shows the day, there is a good chance that Japan will see the radical change in immigration policy that only Orban’s Hungary and Poland (only partially) have had the courage to embrace in Europe so far.
Once bitten, twice shy, we are reluctant to give any government a blank check based solely on public statements, especially considering that most public statements are made not to announce actual policies on the agenda, but to appease the target audience or to send more or less cryptic messages to specific recipients.
However, there is one detail that offers concrete glimmers of hope. And if it gives rise to truly effective policies, it could be an excellent example for our own politics.
The Japanese method
As is well known, the new Japanese Prime Minister Takaichi Sanae has had to deal with a crisis in her original parliamentary majority. The centrist Kōmeitō party (linked to the Buddhist sect Soka Gakkai) decided to withdraw from the majority after 26 years of alliance following Takaichi’s appointment as prime minister-designate in early October, officially following a scandal over the Liberal Democratic Party’s handling of slush funds. In reality, Kōmeitō was disappointed by Takaichi’s nomination as a candidate who was too nationalist for its standards.
In an attempt to forge a new majority, albeit with slim numbers, Takaichi held consultations with other parties, including the surprise party Sanseitō, which declined to support the majority, and the other right-wing party in parliament, the Nippon Ishin no Kai (NINK, Japan Restoration Party), also known as the Japan Innovation Party. Incredibly for the political news we are used to here in the West (and in Italy in particular), media reports of the meetings between Takaichi and the leader of Nippon Ishin, Yoshimura Hirofumi, touched on topics that at first glance may seem surreal, so far removed from the hot topics of the moment: cutting the number of parliamentarians, decentralizing ministries from Tokyo, and finally, reforming the social security system. All of these are seemingly good topics “for all seasons” and ones that Nippon Ishin could have put on the table with any candidate who emerged from the Liberal Democratic Party assembly, even the most progressive-globalist one (it is no coincidence that the matchmaker for the rapprochement between the party and Takaichi is one of the rivals defeated by the new prime minister, Koizumi Shinjirō, son of former Prime Minister Koizumi Jun’ichirō and more moderate than Takaichi on immigration and the economy).
Yet, judging by the press review, these entirely non-ideological issues were raised by Yoshimura as the minimum necessary to form a majority together with Takaichi’s LDP. At the same time, Yoshimura made it known that he was in contact with the leaders of the other opposition parties to assess the possibility of an alternative majority to that with the LDP. In the 465-member lower house, whose decision on the selection of the prime minister takes precedence over that of the upper house, the LDP holds 196 seats, the largest opposition party, the Constitutional Democratic Party of Japan, has 148, Nippon Ishin has 35, and Kōmeitō has 24.
In any case, Yoshimura, who also serves as governor of Osaka (and as such advocates the creation of a “second capital in case of national emergencies,” obviously in his city), said during the talks that he agreed with Takaichi to start political talks on forming a coalition: “I was convinced by her passion,” he said, after stating that the two parties would have to “work together to move Japan forward.”
On October 21, having obtained the external support of NINK, Takaichi was elected prime minister.
From words to deeds?
The three issues mentioned above were actually a quarter of a list of 12 submitted by NINK to the LDP. Now we discover that among these points were, among other things, constitutional reform, the possibility of equipping the Maritime Self-Defense Force (the Navy) with nuclear submarines, the maintenance of the Salic Law for imperial succession, and the rejection of feminist demands on the issue of surnames (a much-debated topic in the country recently).
In practice, these are the points dear to the right wing of the center-right LDP.
What is striking is that it was the first three that made the news in the Japanese media, while the others were discussed much less or not at all. In particular, the issue of “constitutional reform,” which revolves around the progressive reaffirmation of Japanese sovereignty in matters of defense.
Japan, in fact, has a constitution imposed by the United States after the war that theoretically does not allow the country to take any military action, even if attacked. The agreement between Nippon Ishin and the LDP provides for a path to the abolition of Article 9, paragraph 2, of the Constitution, in which the country renounces war as a sovereign right and the threat or use of force to resolve international disputes, so as to allow Japan to fully exercise its right to collective self-defense.
Sharply, the Asahi Shinbun, Japan’s leading newspaper, with very liberal positions, notes that the reduction of parliamentarians, social security reform, and the second capital were immediately pushed into the background as soon as the Takaichi government won the vote of confidence.
In her inaugural speech, Takaichi stated that policies will be implemented to prevent the abandonment of rural inland areas and to support the national population. There is also talk of a “secret war against foreign investors,” suggesting that there are forces determined to use market leverage to bring settlers into Japanese territory and purchase real estate and land in Japan. The fight against the demographic crisis will also involve pro-natalist policies, not immigration policies.
Meanwhile, amid the loud complaints of the Japanese left (and, we can imagine, the internationalist circles behind it), Takaichi has put together a cabinet that will include openly reactionary figures such as Matsumoto Yohei, Kihara Minoru, and Onoda Kimi.
Matsumoto, Kihara, and Onoda: three politicians to watch closely
The first, appointed as Minister of Education, is famous for supporting a revisionist film about the so-called “Nanking Massacre” of 1937, when the Imperial Japanese Army sacked the Chinese city.
Atrocities were certainly committed during the sacking, but according to the version supported by Japanese revisionists, the number of victims attributed to the IJA and many of the accounts of massacres and torture are largely the result of anti- Japan propaganda.
Kihara, the Prime Minister’s chief cabinet secretary, is openly in favor of restoring the Imperial Rescript on Education, the powerful and moving text infused with Confucian philosophy with which Emperor Meiji ordered all his subjects on October 30, 1890, to follow the Way indicated by the imperial ancestors: cultivate the virtues of obedience to the laws, benevolence, friendship, family harmony and filial piety, sacrifice for the Fatherland, study and the arts in the interests of Japan and the divine imperial throne. Until 1948, when it was abolished by order of the American occupiers, the Imperial Rescript had to be memorized by all Japanese students and was recited during the most important public ceremonies to remind subjects of their duties to the kokutai, the Japanese national community.
Onoda Kimi (one of only two female ministers in the Takaichi government: far from the “Swedish-style gender quotas” some had dreamed of…) is the surprising Minister of Economic Security, with responsibility for immigration. Surprising because she is a hafu (from ‘half’ in English), i.e. a mixed-race person. Onoda was born in the US in 1982 to a Japanese mother and an Irish-American father. Her father abandoned the family when Onoda was just one year old, and the child returned with her mother to Japan, facing the difficulty of obtaining Japanese citizenship because Japanese law favors patrilineal ius sanguinis. It was only in 2015 that Onoda obtained full Japanese citizenship, renouncing her US citizenship the following year.
Hoaxes or Overton windows?
The issue of hafu in Japan has been widely exploited in favor of miscegenation and immigration, raising well-orchestrated media campaigns to stigmatize the “xenophobia” of the Japanese people and force them to “open up” to a multiracial society. Onoda herself has also used the argument of racism in the past to respond to those who attacked her politically over the issue of dual citizenship. However, it is now she who has been entrusted with the immigration dossier. And from the premises, it seems that a Trump-style ICE axe may fall on the two million foreigners imported by Japan over the last decade (out of a total of four).
Not pour cause, among many commentators on social media, an urban legend has even spread about the establishment of a “ministry for the deportation of foreigners,” which, at least formally, is completely unfounded. What seems certain is that among the powers assigned to Onoda is that of promoting ‘a more harmonious society’, which in the often elusive Japanese language can mean either an openness to a multiracial society (as the previous Ishiba cabinet probably hoped) or ‘this is Japan, if you don’t like it, there’s the customs office, sayonara’. This is most likely the policy that Onoda will decide to follow.
Even if Onoda’s ministry will not be the “deportation ministry” dreamed of by right-wingers around the world, even left-wing commentators have been unable to ignore its rather unpleasant implications for supporters of immigration, so much so that the Japan Times has christened Onoda’s department the “immigration ministry,” essentially affirming at least the premises from which the enthusiasm of the anti-immigration right wing originated.
A crackdown is therefore expected, which will probably focus on the granting of visas for unskilled workers, the rapid and unappealable expulsion of foreigners who commit criminal acts and illegal immigrants, the abolition of tax and tariff exemptions for foreigners—students or workers—and no concessions in terms of “refugee reception,” which fortunately for the archipelago represents a risible minority. Meanwhile, there is even talk on social media of laws to withdraw citizenship granted to naturalized citizens, in what could be the opening of an interesting Overton window.
Conclusions. Will the Japanese method work?
While Western politics is accustomed to talking a lot, behaving like tigers during election campaigns and then turning into wet kittens once in office, Japan seems to have taken a different approach. As is often the case, the ‘official reasons’ behind the public actions of Japanese politicians are nothing more than formal papier-mâché facades behind which the real motives lie.
Takaichi has inaugurated a new cabinet that seems to be moving in the direction of safeguarding Japan’s national identity, seeking to respond to the challenges of an aging society and labor shortages with a less defeatist attitude than the previous government, which had resigned itself to seeing immigration levels comparable to those of Italy today within 15 years. On the international front, a first unequivocal sign that Takaichi wants a change of pace is that she will snub COP30 to participate in the work of the Diet: Japanese interests VS. “climate change” rhetoric 1-0.
The sirens of her opponents, both inside and outside, always strike the same chord: there is no alternative, because Japan is aging and the economy needs workers. But this brass band seems out of tune and tired. And perhaps even in the Land of the Rising Sun, people will start to seriously stop caring about those who scream that we need tomato pickers at $2 an hour or else the country could collapse.
[Note: in this article, we have chosen to use the Japanese practice of placing the surname before the first name – Photo, Cabinet Secretariat of the Prime Minister of Japan, public domain with attribution]
