October 21, 2025
TOKYO – It is said that things that happen in the United States will happen in Japan about 10 years later. Former economic security minister Sanae Takaichi’s unexpected election to the presidency of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party showed that the Japanese political scene has already become polarized. Following the pattern of the political turmoil in the United States since the 2016 presidential election, political divisions are sure to severely shake the decades-old stability of Japan’s politics.
Takaichi’s most striking speech in the recent LDP presidential election was the one she gave when each of the candidates spoke at LDP headquarters on the first day of official campaigning. She complained about foreign tourists having kicked deer in Nara Park in her home prefecture of Nara and spent more than six of her allotted 15 minutes elaborating on the issue of troublemaking foreigners and illegal immigrants. If elected, she pledged, “I will lay my life on the line to protect our ancient traditions.” Of course, she was already known as a firmly conservative politician, and harsh criticism ensued from both traditional media and social media. Pundits predicted she would fail because her stance was seen as too extreme for moderate conservative LDP members.
But this was not an accurate forecast. Even though Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries Minister Shinjiro Koizumi was the leading candidate in almost all polls of LDP supporters conducted by news media before and during the campaign, Takaichi gained the highest number of votes among party members with about 40% of their votes. Koizumi trailed her by a margin of more than 10 percentage points. Takaichi’s come-from-behind-victory convinced party representatives who hadn’t made up their minds to vote for her in the final ballot, thus making her the first female LDP president.
Takaichi’s deer speech reminds me of Donald Trump’s first speech to announce his presidential bid at Trump Tower in New York on June 16, 2015. He addressed the matter of immigration, saying, “When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best.” He further said: “They’re sending people that have lots of problems … they’re bringing drugs, they’re bringing crime. They’re rapists.” When this happened, most pundits thought a man with such extremely xenophobic ideas must soon be left behind in the race. Nevertheless, he won the Republican Party primaries the following year – and then the presidential election.
I covered the primaries and the presidential election as chief of The Yomiuri Shimbun’s Washington Bureau at that time and was shocked by the polarization of the American people, especially the Republican Party’s shift to the far right. In fact, I wrote that “the Republican Party has turned into the party of Trump.”
Former President Barack Obama analyzed the shift, saying: “It did not start with Donald Trump. He is a symptom, not the cause.”
He was right, but some U.S. experts pointed out that Obama’s own political stance, seen as overemphasizing diversity, was partly to blame. Trump took advantage of conservatives’ frustration. For example, Trump criticized Obama for not using “Merry Christmas” for annual White House holiday card. And social media accelerated the polarization.
By the way, when my son learned the Christmas carol “We Wish You a Merry Christmas” in an American elementary school in 2017, the school changed some of the lyrics in order to take religious diversity into consideration, and the fifth verse was “We wish you a happy Ramadan.”
Getting back to the LDP presidential election, we can see that the LDP has shifted from moderate to nationalistic. Like U.S. conservatives who were frustrated during the Obama era, LDP members were dissatisfied with LDP leaders who hadn’t taken conservatives’ concerns seriously. This was especially true after the administration of former Prime Minister Fumio Kishida supported a law for the promotion of the understanding of LGBT sexual minorities in 2023 and Koizumi pledged during the 2024 LDP presidential election that if elected he would enact within one year an optional system for married couples to keep their separate surnames.
We’ve already seen Sanseito, a party known for xenophobic claims, win 7,425,053 votes in the proportional representation segment of the House of Councillors election this summer, the third highest total for any party. Although LDP members have had a reputation for moderation and balance, the fact is that not only Sanseito supporters but also LDP members have become more nationalistic and populistic. Needless to say, social media has accelerated the shift.
This rightward shift by the LDP caused a great conflict within the LDP-Komeito coalition. In fact, Komeito withdrew from the coalition after a meeting of the two parties’ leaders on Oct. 10.
Komeito’s leaders complained that Takaichi refused their proposal to revise the Political Funds Control Law to limit the entities eligible to receive donations from corporations and organizations to the party headquarters and prefectural-level organizations. Although they said that this was the reason for the dissolution, pundits believed the main reason was that Komeito concluded Takaichi was too nationalistic to work with. From her side, she wouldn’t be able to compromise with Komeito on matters she made pledges about in the LDP presidential election.
At this juncture we don’t know who will be inaugurated as the next prime minister or which parties will coalesce into the new administration. All that is certain is that politics in Japan will face a difficult time of polarization, like the United States has experienced for a decade.