Meet the 'Japanese Trump', who won big in elections

Donald Trump changed the political game and he came onto the scene in 2015.

Ever since his ascendancy to the Oval Office, Trump has spawned a number of political imitators.

You have Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, also known as the ‘Trump of the tropics’, Javier Milei in Argentina, and Rodrigo Duterte in The Philippines.

Now,  Sohei Kamiya in Japan can be added to that list.

Kamiya, whose Sanseito (participate in politics) party has won 14 seats in Japan’s Upper House, has created a stir.

This comes as the country’s ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) lost seats and right-wing parties gained in the in parliament’s upper house.

But who is Kamiya, 47, known as the ‘Japanese Trump’? What do we know about him?

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Let’s take a closer look:

Who is he?

Little is known about Kamiya, a former supermarket manager and English teacher.

Kamiya as a young man worked in his father’s business which later went bankrupt.

However, Kamiya grew disgruntled with the LDP’s fundraising driven culture and left the party.

He founded Sanseito soon afterwards.

Kamiya is a reservist in Japan’s military – known as the Self-Defence Force.

Kamiya, a populist, has claimed to be inspired by Trump’s ‘bold, political style.’

Much like Trump, he has fanned the flames of ‘globalists’ trying to take over Japan, railed against  elites, immigrants and taxes.

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“Under globalism, multinational companies have changed Japan’s policies for their own purposes,” Kamiya said at one rally in Kagoshima “If we fail to resist this foreign pressure, Japan will become a colony!”

He has also made a fervent appeal to Japan’s identity.

“Japan must be a society that serves the interests of the Japanese people”, he has said.

Kamiya founded his Sanseito party in 2020 – at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic.

He said he did so by “gathering people on the Internet”.

Sanseito during the pandemic took a harsh tone on vaccines and slammed the ‘global elite’.

The party’s YouTube channel has over 360,000 subscribers.

It relies on small donors.

While Kamiya didn’t run this year – he won a seat in Japan’s 248 Upper House in 2022 – he has resonated strongly with Japan’s youth.

He has campaigned extensively across the country for his party’s nearly six dozen candidates.

The party itself polled third in a nationwide race.

It has increased its base in the upper house from just 2 seats, including Kamiya himself, to 14 seats.

In the run-up to the polls, it became well-known for its ‘Japan First’ platform – against the influx of immigrants and over-tourism.

Japan in recent years has more and more opened itself up on immigration – mainly to combat low birth rates and an aging population.

Kamiya’s complaints about stationary wages, spikes in inflation and costs of living have drawn plaudits from youth.

“Right now, Japanese people’s lives are getting harder and harder,” Kamiya said. “More and more foreigners are coming (to Japan)”.

“I am attending graduate school but there are no Japanese around me. All of them are foreigners,” said Yu Nagai, a 25-year-old student who voted for Sanseito earlier on Sunday. III

“When I look at the way compensation and money are spent on foreigners, I think that Japanese people are a bit disrespected,” Nagai said after casting his ballot at a polling station in Tokyo’s Shinjuku ward.

The party has suggesting capping the number of foreign residents in each town or city, setting limits on immigration and benefits that foreigners can avail of.

The party also wants to make it more difficult for foreigners to become citizens.

Japan, the world’s fastest aging society, saw foreign-born residents hit a record of about 3.8 million last year.

That is still just three per cent of the total population, a much smaller fraction than in the United States and Europe, but comes amid a tourism boom that has made foreigners far more visible across the country.

What about Sanseito?

Sanseito has called for stricter espionage laws, more tax cuts and renewable energy.

Sanseito is being compared to the Maga movement in America, the AfD in Germany and Reform in UK.

Much like Maga, it too is anti-vaccine.

“Sanseito has become the talk of the town, and particularly here in America, because of the whole populist and anti-foreign sentiment,” Joshua Walker, head of the US-based non-profit Japan Society, said.  “It’s more of a weakness of the LDP and Ishiba than anything else”.

Critics have decried Sanseito’s manifesto as ‘xenophobic and discriminatory’.

The party has also adopted a strong support for ‘traditional gender roles’.

Kamiya, ahead of the polls, attempted to tamp down on some of the party’s contentious ideas.

He also attempted to woo female voters.

However, since the polls, Kamiya has adopted a far more stringent tone.

“The public came to understand that the media was wrong and Sanseito was right,” Kamiya said.

“The phrase Japanese First was meant to express rebuilding Japanese people’s livelihoods by resisting globalism. I am not saying that we should completely ban foreigners or that every foreigner should get out of Japan,” he added.

Experts say Kamiya could fill the vacuum in Japanese politics left by Shinzo Abe.

“The LDP has been unable to hold onto the revisionist and xenophobic element that used to be contained in the Abe faction,” said Koichi Nakano, a Harvard-affiliated political scholar.

Increased pressure on Ishiba

Though the results have weakened Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba's grip on power further , he has vowed to remain party leader.

While the ballot does not directly determine whether Ishiba’s administration will fall, it heaps pressure on the embattled leader who also lost control of the more powerful lower house in October.

Ishiba's Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) and coalition partner Komeito returned 47 seats, short of the 50 seats it needed to ensure a majority in the 248-seat upper chamber in an election where half the seats were up for grabs.

That comes on top of its worst showing in 15 years in October’s lower house election, a vote which has left Ishiba's administration vulnerable to no-confidence motions and calls from within his own party for leadership change.

Speaking late on Sunday evening after exit polls closed, Ishiba told NHK he “solemnly” accepted the “harsh result”.

“We are engaged in extremely critical tariff negotiations with the United States…we must never ruin these negotiations. It is only natural to devote our complete dedication and energy to realizing our national interests,” he later told TV Tokyo.

Asked whether he intended to stay on as premier, he said “that’s right”.

Japan, the world’s fourth largest economy, faces a deadline of August 1 to strike a trade deal with the United States or face punishing tariffs in its largest export market.

The main opposition Constitutional Democratic Party finished second with 22 seats.