Tokyo Report | Politics | East Asia

Japan’s Political Paradox: Why Young Liberals Backed a Conservative Landslide

Are young Japanese voting based on an “idol effect” – or are they redefining entirely what it means to be liberal vs conservative?

The February 2026 lower house election in Japan resulted in a landslide victory for the conservative Liberal Democratic Party (LDP). The LDP secured 316 of the 465 contested seats, achieving a two-thirds supermajority in its own right and setting a new postwar record for seats won by a single party. This is a dramatic reversal of fortune for the LDP, which had lost its majority in the 2024 lower house and 2025 upper house elections.

One aspect of the result merits closer analytical attention: the voting behavior of younger citizens. Pre-election surveys showed Prime Minister Takaichi Sanae’s approval rating reaching as high as 90 percent among voters under 30. Surprisingly, an Asahi Shimbun and University of Osaka survey found that among self-identified liberals aged 18 to 39, 34 percent indicated an intention to vote for the LDP – making it the most popular choice within that cohort. 

That a sizable share of young voters who describe themselves as liberal would select a conservative party led by a nationalist prime minister raises questions about the political attitudes of younger Japanese that existing survey data can only partially answer. 

Sana-mania and Sana-katsu

Some observers attribute this disconnect to an “idol effect” or “Sana-mania.” The theory is that personal appeal – Takaichi being Japan’s first female prime minister, a motorbike enthusiast, and a heavy metal drummer – conveyed through an active social media presence, overrides policy substance for young voters. 

Sana-katsu – an internet expression denoting fan-driven support activities for Takaichi – has been widely reported. Consumer items associated with her, including her ballpoint pen and handbag, have sold out. She has accumulated over 2.7 million followers on X, more than five times her predecessor’s, and an LDP campaign video featuring Takaichi has surpassed 100 million views, far exceeding the reach of any other party. 

A distinctive feature of this idol effect may be social conformity. Young people may have been inclined to “read the air,” meaning to sense prevailing social expectations. As opinion polls have consistently shown strong support for Takaichi, even those who were more reserved may have felt subtle pressure to align with the dominant political mood.

The rapid shifting of young voters’ economic attitudes offers an example of how “Sana-mania” may operate in practice. In a Mainichi Shimbun poll conducted in July 2025, after the LDP’s defeat in the upper house election and before Takaichi took office, 62 percent of 18–29-year-olds and 68 percent of those in their 30s supported a consumption tax cut – figures that stood well above those recorded for older age groups.

However, in November – following the launch of the Takaichi administration and the approval of an economic package that included neither a tax cut nor the cash handouts that had featured in the campaign – the picture had shifted. When asked whether this omission was appropriate, 37 percent of those in their late teens and 20s and in their 30s said it was, compared with 33 percent of those in their 60s and 30 percent of those aged 70 and above. Younger respondents had become notably more accepting of an economic policy outcome that departed from the position they had expressed only months earlier. 

However, several deeper explanations for younger citizens’ votes in the 2026 lower house election are worth examining. One possibility lies in an attitudinal shift toward authoritarian values among younger Japanese in recent years. Another involves a broader ideological disorientation – or reorientation – that has taken place over recent decades in how young Japanese make sense of the left–right divide.

Shifting Values Among the Young

The values of younger Japanese may be shifting. An Asahi Shimbun and University of Osaka survey on junior high school students in the Tokyo metropolitan area showed that the proportion agreeing that “people who break the rules should be punished strictly” rose from 59 percent in 2018 to 79 percent in 2025. Although this is a single indicator, a 20-point increase over seven years is noteworthy and can be interpreted as evidence of rising conformist and authoritarian values among younger generations in Japan.

If younger cohorts are indeed becoming more oriented toward strict norm enforcement, social order, and deference to authority, this could help partly explain their receptiveness to Takaichi’s messaging: her firm stance on immigration, framed around rule-breaking by foreigners; her resistance to progressive reforms on gender-related policies such as the introduction of separate surnames for married couples, the legalization of same-sex marriage, and the question of a female emperor; and her broader emphasis on national strength. Such orientations are consistent with what the literature describes as authoritarian personality profiles – a preference for strong leadership, sharper in-group and out-group distinctions, and skepticism toward advocates of minority rights or social change.

This conservative shift may have been underway before Takaichi took office. In the July 2025 upper house election, the far-right party Sanseito increased its seat total from one to 14, running on a “Japanese First” platform centered on anti-immigrant, anti-globalist, and anti-establishment rhetoric. Sanseito mobilized its support through social media. Reportedly, 20 percent of 18–19-year-old voters supported Sanseito, higher than older cohorts, and the party’s core support base was men aged 18 to 39. That a sizable share of young voters was already gravitating toward such a platform prior to Takaichi’s ascent suggests that her appeal to younger cohorts may have tapped a pre-existing attitudinal current rather than created one.

It should be noted, however, that the most recent longitudinal study of authoritarian values in Japan – research by Antonio Benasaglio Berlucchi and Airo Hino, published in 2022, drawing on Asian Barometer Survey data from 2003 to 2019 – found no sizable increase in authoritarian values over that period, despite finding that authoritarian values were closely associated with voting for the right-wing LDP. 

The junior high school survey cited above and the support for Sanseito among young voters in July 2025 together raise the question of whether a more recent attitudinal shift among the young may have begun to emerge. Whether this reflects a genuine generational effect or a life-cycle effect – a transient response to specific economic and political circumstances such as rising living costs and institutional distrust – is what updated survey analysis would need to determine.

The Breakdown of Ideological Categories

A second and arguably more fundamental issue is that traditional ideological categories may no longer be meaningful to younger voters. Survey research has documented a striking generational gap in how Japanese citizens map the political spectrum, suggesting that the traditional kakushin–hoshu (liberal–conservative) framework has lost much of its cognitive salience among younger voters. A 2012 survey already showed that many voters under 40 placed the Japanese Communist Party (JCP) near the center of this scale or even to the right of it, while right-wing populist parties were perceived as more “progressive” than the JCP. 

The historical roots of this disorientation are traceable. In the postwar decades, Japan’s politics were structured by a Cold War cleavage: conservative hoshu forces, led by the LDP, favored constitutional revision and strengthening the U.S. alliance, while progressive kakushin forces sought to preserve the constitution and limit American influence. Voters who underwent political socialization in that era internalized these definitions. 

Younger cohorts, however, came of age during and after the 1990s, when the old party system collapsed, parties repeatedly fragmented and recombined, and policy differences between major parties narrowed – partly as a structural consequence of the 1994 electoral reform, which replaced multi-member constituencies with single-member districts and thereby incentivized centrist convergence. 

For younger voters, the old ideological template was no longer a helpful guide. This disorientation has coincided with a broader detachment from party politics: a 2024 Pew Research Center survey found that over half of Japanese voters did not identify with any political party, and only a third were satisfied with how Japan’s democracy works.

Rather than liberal-versus-conservative, younger voters may tend to organize their political perceptions around a different divide: change-versus-status-quo, pitting established political forces against those seeking change. Under this framework, Takaichi may have come across as an agent of change rather than defender of tradition due to her fiscal activism, her hardline stance toward China and departure from her predecessors’ cautious remarks on the Taiwan issue, her decision to frame the election as a personal referendum on her leadership, and her symbolic status as Japan’s first female prime minister in a political system dominated by dynastic male politicians, given her lack of dynastic political advantages. This is notwithstanding her conservative positions on gender-related issues. A young voter who identifies as “liberal” but understands that term through a change-versus-status quo lens, rather than a left-versus-right one, may therefore perceive no contradiction in supporting her.

The two possibilities here – rising authoritarian values on the one hand, and ideological disorientation or reorientation on the other – are not mutually exclusive, and both require empirical testing with the latest data. The election result was also shaped by factors not clearly age-specific: the failure of the newly formed Centrist Reform Alliance, a compressed campaign schedule, and Takaichi’s appeal across age groups. Inferring durable attitudinal trends from a single electoral outcome requires considerable caution.

What the available evidence does suggest is a set of questions that merit systematic investigation. Are authoritarian values among younger Japanese cohorts genuinely increasing, or do isolated survey findings reflect measurement artifacts? Is this authoritarian shift the result of longer-term generational effects or shorter-term life-cycle effects? When young voters describe themselves as liberal, what ideological content, if any, do they attach to that label? How do they place Takaichi, Sanseito, and the LDP on the ideological scale? To what extent does support for Takaichi reflect substantive policy agreement rather than a personalized response to leadership style and social media visibility? These are empirical questions that can be addressed through new opinion polling and repeated survey data examining longitudinal attitudinal change and the relationships between ideologies and demographic variables.

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The February 2026 lower house election in Japan resulted in a landslide victory for the conservative Liberal Democratic Party (LDP). The LDP secured 316 of the 465 contested seats, achieving a two-thirds supermajority in its own right and setting a new postwar record for seats won by a single party. This is a dramatic reversal of fortune for the LDP, which had lost its majority in the 2024 lower house and 2025 upper house elections.

One aspect of the result merits closer analytical attention: the voting behavior of younger citizens. Pre-election surveys showed Prime Minister Takaichi Sanae’s approval rating reaching as high as 90 percent among voters under 30. Surprisingly, an Asahi Shimbun and University of Osaka survey found that among self-identified liberals aged 18 to 39, 34 percent indicated an intention to vote for the LDP – making it the most popular choice within that cohort. 

That a sizable share of young voters who describe themselves as liberal would select a conservative party led by a nationalist prime minister raises questions about the political attitudes of younger Japanese that existing survey data can only partially answer. 

Sana-mania and Sana-katsu

Some observers attribute this disconnect to an “idol effect” or “Sana-mania.” The theory is that personal appeal – Takaichi being Japan’s first female prime minister, a motorbike enthusiast, and a heavy metal drummer – conveyed through an active social media presence, overrides policy substance for young voters. 

Sana-katsu – an internet expression denoting fan-driven support activities for Takaichi – has been widely reported. Consumer items associated with her, including her ballpoint pen and handbag, have sold out. She has accumulated over 2.7 million followers on X, more than five times her predecessor’s, and an LDP campaign video featuring Takaichi has surpassed 100 million views, far exceeding the reach of any other party. 

A distinctive feature of this idol effect may be social conformity. Young people may have been inclined to “read the air,” meaning to sense prevailing social expectations. As opinion polls have consistently shown strong support for Takaichi, even those who were more reserved may have felt subtle pressure to align with the dominant political mood.

The rapid shifting of young voters’ economic attitudes offers an example of how “Sana-mania” may operate in practice. In a Mainichi Shimbun poll conducted in July 2025, after the LDP’s defeat in the upper house election and before Takaichi took office, 62 percent of 18–29-year-olds and 68 percent of those in their 30s supported a consumption tax cut – figures that stood well above those recorded for older age groups.

However, in November – following the launch of the Takaichi administration and the approval of an economic package that included neither a tax cut nor the cash handouts that had featured in the campaign – the picture had shifted. When asked whether this omission was appropriate, 37 percent of those in their late teens and 20s and in their 30s said it was, compared with 33 percent of those in their 60s and 30 percent of those aged 70 and above. Younger respondents had become notably more accepting of an economic policy outcome that departed from the position they had expressed only months earlier. 

However, several deeper explanations for younger citizens’ votes in the 2026 lower house election are worth examining. One possibility lies in an attitudinal shift toward authoritarian values among younger Japanese in recent years. Another involves a broader ideological disorientation – or reorientation – that has taken place over recent decades in how young Japanese make sense of the left–right divide.

Shifting Values Among the Young

The values of younger Japanese may be shifting. An Asahi Shimbun and University of Osaka survey on junior high school students in the Tokyo metropolitan area showed that the proportion agreeing that “people who break the rules should be punished strictly” rose from 59 percent in 2018 to 79 percent in 2025. Although this is a single indicator, a 20-point increase over seven years is noteworthy and can be interpreted as evidence of rising conformist and authoritarian values among younger generations in Japan.

If younger cohorts are indeed becoming more oriented toward strict norm enforcement, social order, and deference to authority, this could help partly explain their receptiveness to Takaichi’s messaging: her firm stance on immigration, framed around rule-breaking by foreigners; her resistance to progressive reforms on gender-related policies such as the introduction of separate surnames for married couples, the legalization of same-sex marriage, and the question of a female emperor; and her broader emphasis on national strength. Such orientations are consistent with what the literature describes as authoritarian personality profiles – a preference for strong leadership, sharper in-group and out-group distinctions, and skepticism toward advocates of minority rights or social change.

This conservative shift may have been underway before Takaichi took office. In the July 2025 upper house election, the far-right party Sanseito increased its seat total from one to 14, running on a “Japanese First” platform centered on anti-immigrant, anti-globalist, and anti-establishment rhetoric. Sanseito mobilized its support through social media. Reportedly, 20 percent of 18–19-year-old voters supported Sanseito, higher than older cohorts, and the party’s core support base was men aged 18 to 39. That a sizable share of young voters was already gravitating toward such a platform prior to Takaichi’s ascent suggests that her appeal to younger cohorts may have tapped a pre-existing attitudinal current rather than created one.

It should be noted, however, that the most recent longitudinal study of authoritarian values in Japan – research by Antonio Benasaglio Berlucchi and Airo Hino, published in 2022, drawing on Asian Barometer Survey data from 2003 to 2019 – found no sizable increase in authoritarian values over that period, despite finding that authoritarian values were closely associated with voting for the right-wing LDP. 

The junior high school survey cited above and the support for Sanseito among young voters in July 2025 together raise the question of whether a more recent attitudinal shift among the young may have begun to emerge. Whether this reflects a genuine generational effect or a life-cycle effect – a transient response to specific economic and political circumstances such as rising living costs and institutional distrust – is what updated survey analysis would need to determine.

The Breakdown of Ideological Categories

A second and arguably more fundamental issue is that traditional ideological categories may no longer be meaningful to younger voters. Survey research has documented a striking generational gap in how Japanese citizens map the political spectrum, suggesting that the traditional kakushin–hoshu (liberal–conservative) framework has lost much of its cognitive salience among younger voters. A 2012 survey already showed that many voters under 40 placed the Japanese Communist Party (JCP) near the center of this scale or even to the right of it, while right-wing populist parties were perceived as more “progressive” than the JCP. 

The historical roots of this disorientation are traceable. In the postwar decades, Japan’s politics were structured by a Cold War cleavage: conservative hoshu forces, led by the LDP, favored constitutional revision and strengthening the U.S. alliance, while progressive kakushin forces sought to preserve the constitution and limit American influence. Voters who underwent political socialization in that era internalized these definitions. 

Younger cohorts, however, came of age during and after the 1990s, when the old party system collapsed, parties repeatedly fragmented and recombined, and policy differences between major parties narrowed – partly as a structural consequence of the 1994 electoral reform, which replaced multi-member constituencies with single-member districts and thereby incentivized centrist convergence. 

For younger voters, the old ideological template was no longer a helpful guide. This disorientation has coincided with a broader detachment from party politics: a 2024 Pew Research Center survey found that over half of Japanese voters did not identify with any political party, and only a third were satisfied with how Japan’s democracy works.

Rather than liberal-versus-conservative, younger voters may tend to organize their political perceptions around a different divide: change-versus-status-quo, pitting established political forces against those seeking change. Under this framework, Takaichi may have come across as an agent of change rather than defender of tradition due to her fiscal activism, her hardline stance toward China and departure from her predecessors’ cautious remarks on the Taiwan issue, her decision to frame the election as a personal referendum on her leadership, and her symbolic status as Japan’s first female prime minister in a political system dominated by dynastic male politicians, given her lack of dynastic political advantages. This is notwithstanding her conservative positions on gender-related issues. A young voter who identifies as “liberal” but understands that term through a change-versus-status quo lens, rather than a left-versus-right one, may therefore perceive no contradiction in supporting her.

The two possibilities here – rising authoritarian values on the one hand, and ideological disorientation or reorientation on the other – are not mutually exclusive, and both require empirical testing with the latest data. The election result was also shaped by factors not clearly age-specific: the failure of the newly formed Centrist Reform Alliance, a compressed campaign schedule, and Takaichi’s appeal across age groups. Inferring durable attitudinal trends from a single electoral outcome requires considerable caution.

What the available evidence does suggest is a set of questions that merit systematic investigation. Are authoritarian values among younger Japanese cohorts genuinely increasing, or do isolated survey findings reflect measurement artifacts? Is this authoritarian shift the result of longer-term generational effects or shorter-term life-cycle effects? When young voters describe themselves as liberal, what ideological content, if any, do they attach to that label? How do they place Takaichi, Sanseito, and the LDP on the ideological scale? To what extent does support for Takaichi reflect substantive policy agreement rather than a personalized response to leadership style and social media visibility? These are empirical questions that can be addressed through new opinion polling and repeated survey data examining longitudinal attitudinal change and the relationships between ideologies and demographic variables.

Peter Chai, or Kai Shibata, is a Ph.D. researcher at the Graduate School of Political Science, Waseda University. He holds a BA in Economics and MA in Political Science from Waseda University. His research areas are political sociology, comparative politics, and public opinion, and his regional focus is East Asia.

Willy Jou is an associate professor at Waseda University. He holds a PhD in political science from the University of California Irvine. His research focuses on comparing ideological orientations and attitudes toward democracy, particularly in new democracies. He is a co-author of “Why Policy Representation Matters” (Routledge, 2015) and “Generation Gap in Japanese Politics” (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016).

Japan authoritarianism

Takaichi approval ratings

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