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Japan’s Far Right Is Courting Young Voters

Sanseitō has attracted young voters through a robust social-media strategy, Charlie Kirk–like public speaking events, and anti-establishment messaging.

Viewers became party members, and party members became organizers. Eventually, they became voters, too.

On May 16, the founder of Japan’s extremist right-wing Sanseitō party Sohei Kamiya was scheduled to speak at the University of Tokyo’s annual May Festival, an event mostly attended by freshmen. His planned appearance, organized by the conservative student group Ugo no Shū, was met with student protests, insistent calls to cancel the event, tweets expressing outrage, and an anonymous bomb threat.

A University of Tokyo student who spoke on the condition of anonymity due to fears of retaliation, told The Nation that Sanseitō’s polarizing rhetoric was a key reason behind the strong response. “I think [Kamiya] is kind of similar to Trump or maybe Hitler, and in fact, many people are saying that Kamiya is [using public speaking in the same way as] Hitler.”

Kamiya’s speech was eventually canceled, and by that afternoon, university organizers had called off the entire first day of May Festival programming. “Nobody thought that it was going to be canceled because some students were excited to have a debate with [Kamiya] on various political issues,” Taisei Katayama, a student whose law classroom was going to be used for the event, told The Nation. But the incident shaped up to be perhaps the most dramatic instance of backlash to date against Sanseitō, a right-wing populist party born in 2020 and explicitly inspired by President Trump.

Sanseitō, which literally means “political participation party,” has gained significant ground among Japanese youth. Whether its recent surge among young people will prove lasting remains uncertain, given vocal and, at times, heated opposition to the party. But experts say its rise reflects a broader political shift extending well beyond Japan: the growing appeal of right-wing populist movements around the world, including the coalitions that propelled President Trump to power in the United States.

“I think the younger generation has become less interested in politics because the same party has run this country for a long time,” they said. “People want a new party.” The Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), a broad-tent conservative party, has governed has Japan for nearly all of the seven decades since its founding in 1955.

In Japan’s upper-house election in July 2025, roughly a quarter of voters in their teens and 20s cast their ballots for Sanseitō, according to a national exit poll. Among voters in their 30s, the party polled around 23 percent in the same exit poll, more than any other party. For comparison, the LDP polled around 12 percent among voters in their teens and 20s and 13 percent among those in their 30s.

“The interesting thing here is that young people make up Sanseitō’s core base,” Chris Burgess, a professor of Japanese studies at Tsuda University, Tokyo, told The Nation. “If you look at the right-wing parties in Britain and the Brexit vote, for example, the main supporters were older people—but in Japan, it’s the opposite.”

Part of the reason behind the party’s powerful young base might lie in where Sanseitō started to do its politics: online.

When Kamiya first founded the party in 2020, Sanseitō occupied a small niche. But a series of YouTube videos made by Kamiya and two former party affiliates in which they questioned the Covid-19 vaccine, was all the party needed to gain an online following.

Traditional Japanese parties have garnered........

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