Japan Upper House -Wahl: Ist ein Land auf der rechten Seite?

It would be difficult to imagine a friendlier and more tolerant xenophobe than Jun Tajima. The 40-year-old estate agent from Tokyo loves talking to foreigners in the fluent English that he taught himself by watching coverage of the Premier League. He is an equally ardent follower of Major League Baseball and longs to visit London or Los Angeles.

This Sunday, however, he will vote for the most extreme right-wing party to win significant success in Japan since the Second World War. It is a movement whose central plank is its dislike and mistrust of foreigners in Japan. Sanseito, literally the “political participation party”, compares itself to the hard-right Alternative for Germany (AfD), France’s National Rally and Reform UK.

Its leader, Sohei Kamiya, is sceptical about vaccines, has warned of the menace of “Jewish capital” and believes that Japan should have its own nuclear weapons. But the party is known and defined by its slogan “Japanese First”, which has propelled immigration and mass tourism to the forefront of electoral politics with a greater intensity than ever before.

A remarkable and growing number of people agree with him. Before Sunday’s voting for half the seats in the upper house of Japan’s national parliament, the Diet, some polls show Sanseito moving into third place, behind the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) and its historic opponent, the centre-left Constitutional Democratic Party of Japan. A poll by the Asahi newspaper suggested that in the vote for seats allocated by proportional representation, Sanseito could win as many as 14 per cent of votes cast by the unaffiliated, compared with 19 per cent for the LDP.

The LDP leader, Shigeru Ishiba, has been leading a minority government since the general election last September, when the party lost control of the lower house of the Diet, which chooses the prime minister. All the indications are that the party will shed more seats on Sunday, worsening Ishiba’s already desperate situation and opening the way to party rivals to challenge his party leadership — although whether anyone else would want the job at such a grim juncture is not clear.

More significant in the long run, though, may be the rise of Sanseito, a force for ultra-right nationalism such as Japan has not seen before