Who Really Controls Japan's Far Right?

Like so many other countries, Japan has a complex mix of political parties and activist movements -- some are gigantic, and some are small. Some are legit, and some are crazy. In the recent election, one fringe, far-right party named Sanseitō skyrocketed in the polls, gaining unprecedented prominence on a 'Japan First' platform peddling conspiracy theories, anti-foreigner legislation, and revisionist history about World War II. Is that really what the Japanese voters want? Journalists, critics and the public have serious questions, and are asking whether this group is, itself, funded by foreign powers seeking to destroy Japan from within.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is
riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or
learn the stuff they don't want you to know. A
production of iHeart Radio.

Speaker 2 (00:26):
Hello, welcome back to the show. My name is Matt,
my name is Noah.

Speaker 3 (00:29):
They call me Ben. We're joined as always with our
super producer Dylan the Tennessee pal Fagan. Most importantly, you
are you. You are here. That makes this the stuff
they don't want you to know. Guys, you remember that
it's an observation that only grows more relevant over time.
People say, no one wants to be living through the

(00:53):
times of which history is made, right.

Speaker 4 (00:55):
Yeah, kind of impossible though, because I guess history is
sort of always being made in it we're working live
well now.

Speaker 2 (01:03):
I think it means people want to not have the
stress and maybe fear and all of the things that
come with a big historical event.

Speaker 4 (01:11):
Right too bad suckers, where you find yourself.

Speaker 2 (01:15):
We want smooth sailing, I think I think generally that's
what human beings want. But we've also got this thing
where in our media and things, most of the stuff
really interested in is the exciting, crazy.

Speaker 3 (01:29):
Stuff from the past. But also from the present as
long as it's not touching us. Yeah, and the future
as long as it's not over the horizon quite yet.
And history proves time and time again. We've seen this
on every show we have touched, as EPs, as voice actors,
as writers, as hosts. History proves that in chaotic times,

(01:52):
the public will look for alternatives to the status quo,
whatever that status quo may be. Sometimes this leads to
things that history calls good revolutions, the French and American
Revolution right when the rejection of monarchy, and then sometimes
you know, it gets a little sith lordie. Chaos can
lead to a search for alternatives like fascism or dictatorships

(02:15):
or coups. Chaos reigns, Chaos reigns, and chaos is a
ladder for better or worse.

Speaker 2 (02:20):
I watched a Mister Robot episode where one of the
characters use that term and used it in that way.

Speaker 4 (02:27):
It was robot fun twist on a child's board game
would be coups and ladders.

Speaker 3 (02:32):
I love it. Yeah, I think it's brilliant. What we
also see here is that, just like our discussion with
governments and AI, the modern information age hasn't really changed
this tendency. Instead, it's ushered in a new toolbox, a
new way to escalate this pattern. That's why there are
so many world governments accused of interfering with elections and

(02:56):
sovereign domestic politics. And tonight's story. First off, yes, this
is a story about political conspiracies, but also it's a
story about patterns. This is about a country that might
be facing something similar as we record the rise of
the far right in Japan and the growing allegations that
there may be a conspiracy powering it.

Speaker 4 (03:18):
Absolutely, But first we're gonna hear a quick word from
our sponsor.

Speaker 3 (03:28):
Here are the facts, all right, We've talked about this
a lot. I don't want to sound like a wiyaboo,
and we're going to keep any personal anecdotes to a
bare minimum.

Speaker 4 (03:38):
Not me, I'm putting it all out there.

Speaker 2 (03:42):
Can I just say I think your experience, Ben, in particular,
would be extremely helpful for this episode. I feel a
bit in the dark as we're going into this, but
just really.

Speaker 4 (03:51):
In terms of on the ground experience of this kind
of thing, because you know, a lot of these things
don't even make the news over here. A lot of
the things that we're going to be talking about today,
let alone being available for us to you know, set
our very eyes on and see the way of functions.

Speaker 2 (04:04):
I just think your input and or any anecdote you've
gotten could be extremely helpful for me personally to understand
this a little better.

Speaker 5 (04:12):
Ah.

Speaker 3 (04:13):
I think we'll I hear you and appreciate it. I
think will also be darkly surprised by how many parallels
are going to be in this story. Across the Ocean's blue,
Across the Ocean's blue. I'm of a maritime sort of mind.

Speaker 4 (04:30):
What are we talking about? We're talking about the crime cruise, right,
so that's called but it's sort of like that. We're
doing a Virgin Mega Cruz True Crime. Theend are going
to be on the high seas coming up pretty soon.
I think you could still buy your tickets, y'all.

Speaker 3 (04:45):
I believe so. Yeah, this is our organic mention, and
we're being so smooth with it. October tenth through the fifteenth.
Join us for smooth seas, you know, that's the hope.

Speaker 2 (04:58):
And look, if you come on this thing, you might
go snorkeling with us. Weird, there might be sharks involved.

Speaker 4 (05:06):
Trivia, you know.

Speaker 3 (05:07):
Yeah, you might see a shipwreck. You'll definitely go through
the Bermuda Triangle with us, where we have hatched up
the bride idea of recording our Bermuda Triangle episode live
from the location.

Speaker 4 (05:19):
No tempting fade there. It's gonna be fine. Join us.
You can hold hands, guys.

Speaker 2 (05:25):
I've got the first version of the video and I'm
working on the sound design and music. Right now. That's
gonna play. I guess people are coming in. We're gonna
make people feel so freaking uncomfortable and scary people.

Speaker 3 (05:39):
We're gonna bring people together.

Speaker 4 (05:41):
This is not sanctioned by the Version Corporation.

Speaker 3 (05:43):
Matthew and like the decembers said, you know, if worst
comes the worst, we'll both go down together.

Speaker 4 (05:49):
Also said, I'm a jolly little chimbley boy.

Speaker 2 (05:52):
Is that a veiled if we're both going down together?

Speaker 3 (05:55):
Is that a I think that one's about jumping off
of a building. It's metaphor. Laden's okay. There's a lot
of possibility there, and this will be This will be
great because it will get all of us together in
this one place and we'll be focused on one thing
and we'll probably agree what the revelations we discover. And
that's cool because it doesn't usually happen anywhere else in

(06:17):
human society. Right outside of a focused show or exploration.

Speaker 4 (06:22):
You're just outside of our particular friend group. Never does occur.

Speaker 3 (06:26):
We'll fight all the time.

Speaker 2 (06:28):
In the end, we're going to explore mysteries and you'll
take away whatever you take from it.

Speaker 4 (06:31):
Right, But in the end, possibly you're a souvenir.

Speaker 2 (06:34):
Yeah, but you'll be in the Bermuda triangle.

Speaker 4 (06:38):
It's gonna be sick. I'm excited. I haven't been on
a cruise before, and I'm really really looking forward to
hanging out with you guys on the high seas and
talk about some some spooky stuff.

Speaker 3 (06:47):
And with that, the reason we're emphasizing this idea of
agreeing being on the same page, and why that is
so important is because pretty much any other place you go,
or any other human endeavor you counter, you will see
that everyone disagrees. And Japan is no different. Japan is
full of competing ideologies and political parties. This is not unique,

(07:09):
it is not unusual.

Speaker 4 (07:10):
Well, and it's funny. I was just gonna ask, maybe
this is a dumb question, but like we're talking about
the right and the lefts like obviously, when when I
ask to the right or left of what the answer
is center? But who determines, like culturally, which ideology is
represented by which side of zero?

Speaker 3 (07:27):
You know, that's an interesting question. That's when we'll get
to because every center party, you know, as a your
mileage may vary situation, and historically we'll get into this
a little bit. Historically you call Japan more or less
culturally conservative, and a lot of a lot of East Asia,

(07:48):
to be fair, is that way. But in Japan, you know,
just like anywhere else, anywhere you go, you're going to
find a spectrum of groups with priorities and values that
sometimes combine and converge and then sometimes contradict and people
get at loggerheads. Here in the United States, for example,
speaking of centrism, there are two big political parties. You

(08:10):
got the Democrats, you got the Republicans. But each of
those terms, as we've discussed before in some pretty cool stuff,
each of those terms is like a it's an umbrella
phrase because within under the umbrella of democracy you'll find,
you know, the little umbrellas of Democrats, little umbrella Republicans,

(08:30):
and under that a monopoly of tinier umbrellas, tighier movements.

Speaker 2 (08:35):
And ultimately it all represents campaign finance donations, right, and
which which primary corporations and entities donate to which of
those two parties, and then how is that divided up
amongst individual candidates?

Speaker 4 (08:49):
And not to mention that I mean you're talking about
campaign I mean we're talking about a collection of campaign
promises and sort of treatises that are put out there
exclusively in the form of rhetoric, you know, and let's
just call it what it is, propaganda that doesn't always
add up to the way things actually end up, you know,
when folks are elected from either side.

Speaker 2 (09:08):
Absolutely, I just want to make that point that it's
it ends up those cliques that we're talking about inside
like the bigger umbrella groups, often those are divided up
amongst groups of people, groups of what appear to be
independent let's say representatives or people from certain states or
a scattering of states. You can use money and like
CARDI B make money moves to create like clicks and

(09:32):
movements of belief of you know what a group is
all about within this umbrella. And all you got, all
you have to do is inject enough money to get
enough candidates to believe the same thing. Then you can
push that and push it and push it and grow
it and make it larger until it potentially can take
over one of these umbrellas.

Speaker 3 (09:52):
Mm hmm and becomes the establishment.

Speaker 4 (09:55):
And it's so cynical, I know, but I mean, I
can't help but think that the only true belief is
in the money, that a lot of the other ones
are just sort of weaponized.

Speaker 3 (10:01):
Beliefs that are used.

Speaker 4 (10:03):
To sort of manipulate the populace. Like I just have
a real hard time believing in true believers in governments,
you know.

Speaker 3 (10:10):
Yeah, I hear you. The one thing we would add
as an asterisk to this is that money is a
representation of resource, right, it's labor over time. So there
are historically massive upheavals in social dynamics where people are
starving and someone comes along and says, I'll feed you, right,
and you can worry about the other stuff. We can

(10:33):
talk about that later. But wouldn't you like to eat
something when you like some rootabagas, some squash, et cetera,
and please.

Speaker 2 (10:42):
That's a good way to get loyalty, right.

Speaker 3 (10:45):
Right exactly. And so money then is an escalation of
that age old concept and these. Yeah, I love your
point about the Overton window.

Speaker 2 (10:54):
Right.

Speaker 3 (10:55):
So here in the US, sure, the big boys, the
Democrats and the Republicans actively work together like Pepsi and
coke to repress competitors, to kill them in the womb, really,
or to buy them or buy them, neuter them somehow, right, sanitize,
sterilize them. And that's why far right movements and far
left movements and independent movements are all over the US.

(11:18):
But the FEC won't let them be uh. And that's fine.

Speaker 4 (11:22):
That is Federal Election Commission.

Speaker 3 (11:25):
That is Yeah, check out our episode on that speaking.

Speaker 2 (11:30):
Yeah, good luck getting on a debate that it means
anything whatsoever one of those parties.

Speaker 4 (11:35):
It's sort of like Oscar campaigns. Like everyone thinks magically
that the best things win the Oscar, But the things
that win the Oscar are the ones that had the
big money behind them to make their Oscar campaigns. You know,
it's I mean, it's just it's it's an illusion of
quality or this illusion of like democracy, I guess, or
you know, what's the word I'm looking for.

Speaker 3 (11:55):
Meritocracy. Yes, meritocracy. I love that word and I wish
it was practiced more often. Also. You know, one thing
that's totally different from that, of course, is the podcast awards.
Everybody tune in for the MP's and the Webbies coming
to a town near you.

Speaker 4 (12:08):
Yeah, definitely the fixes and in on those.

Speaker 3 (12:11):
So we see that these smaller groups, right may team
up with the big dogs on certain issues, right like
the the LDP, which is a weirdly misleading name, is
the big party in Japan. We'll get to them, but
they have under their umbrella they have a lot of
other smaller parties that agree with them on certain issues,

(12:33):
and we'll team up with them to vote for certain
things and policies. But at the same time, these smaller crews,
these smaller clicks, are still pushing other parts of their
respective agendas. That happens constantly.

Speaker 4 (12:46):
In Japan is a quote unquote proper democracy, right, Well, yes, okay, okay,
I'm just just asking the question. Yeah, I don't know,
it's not on it like, it's just not something that
I am completely immersed in, you know, And I think
I get it in general, but I want to know
when a lot of these shifts took place, and I

(13:07):
have to imagine that some of them took place after
the war.

Speaker 2 (13:10):
It's a democracy on a diet.

Speaker 3 (13:12):
It's a democracy on a diet. Diet, let's get a drug,
let's get Dylan. Thank you for anybody who notices that
is an amazing joke. That's very well written, and thank
you for that. Matt. Yeah, maybe the way to say
it is Japan is a diet is the funniest way.
But Japan is a democracy that loves its royal family well.

Speaker 4 (13:34):
And one could maybe argue that that makes it easier
to control, and that there's probably it's a little more
consistent than things over here might be right.

Speaker 3 (13:42):
Yes, it's similar to what we see in European style
democracies that still have a royal family that might have
largely symbolic power, but a great deal of economic heft
because they own a lot of stuff from back in
the day. But they have these weird agreements that say
something like, yes, you are required as the you know,

(14:05):
the king of this place or the queen of this place,
to show up for these events. You make these speeches,
you know what I mean, where that funny outfit, where
this specific outfit, and then you go back home and
we're going we the elected representatives are going to handle
the day to day business of government and the wheel
of power, and that's that's a thing that sounds silly,

(14:29):
but it is an important distinction. And the United States,
not once, but at multiple times got so very close
to having acknowledged monarchs, and it's a bullet we keep
trying to matrix dodge.

Speaker 4 (14:43):
It was absolutely a post war situation when they had
a constitution drafted and became a democracy after being you know,
having their asses handed to them.

Speaker 3 (14:55):
Yeah, at the end of World War two.

Speaker 4 (14:56):
Oh, we we'll get to that, but we have to
point out too and is answering my own question that
genuine I just was guessing that that was probably tasty, have.

Speaker 3 (15:05):
Omami to it.

Speaker 2 (15:06):
Yeah, we're gonna have to get in the weeds when
it comes to like what the what the democracy actually
looks like, how it functions, the different ways it's split up.
And then the emperor has some sneaky stuff in there
that's way more powerful than you'd expect, and we'll get
let's get into that, but first of all, let's let's
jump back to the US really quickly, because we're talking
about some of the ways in which these sub parties, right,

(15:29):
not the big players can actually play a role in
let's say election right.

Speaker 3 (15:34):
In pushing the Overton window of conversation. You know, the
Green We're probably never going to have a Green Party
president in most of our listener's lifetimes. And you might
hear this and be in the US and you might say, look,
the Green Party, what a bunch of cuckoos. Anarchy is dumb,
Or you might not vibe with libertarians, or you might

(15:56):
be embarrassed by a local politician that you personally don't
support your neck of the woods. But the thing is
that's not inherently bad. When democracy works, it gives everyone
the opportunity to make their opinions known. The original donors
to any campaign were always supposed to be the voters.
Has changed post Citizens United, and that's never been true

(16:18):
in practice. But that's the idea on the paper.

Speaker 2 (16:21):
It really is great in theory.

Speaker 3 (16:23):
It's so much stuff is cool in theory. Like I
told you guys about trying to invent the farido, it's
a burrito that also utilizes the amazing technology of FA
and the world's just not ready quite yet.

Speaker 2 (16:36):
There's called tortillas.

Speaker 3 (16:41):
We'll see. Now we've just formed two different parties and
we can work together. Okay, So we know that these
times of instability, this is just the quick abstract structuralis
above it. The times of instability create opportunities for beliefs
and movements that would have been dismissed as fringe. Right,
everything's going to pot everything's going sideways and pear shaped,

(17:04):
and this leads us to the public to say, there's
got to be a better way, just like on a
made for TV commercial. That's why the threat of war
and economic collapse in particular historically often lead to nationalism,
to do countries saying hey us first.

Speaker 2 (17:23):
Yeah, yeah, we've been spending a lot of resources in
time out there in the others, in the other worlds.
What about this place? Man? What about my pension? And
I get that makes total sense.

Speaker 4 (17:34):
I mean when the planes going down, they say put
the mask on yourself first, So you know, it does
to a certain degree. But then it becomes a rhetoric
in and of itself where it supplants like everything else
and sometimes even you know, things way outside of the
realms of like logic.

Speaker 3 (17:49):
Yeah. The thing about binary in out group reasoning is
that it feels very convenient at the beginning, but you
have to realize those that ideology only gains power as
long as the inn group gets smaller and smaller. So
let's say you have a dozen friends, right, and then

(18:13):
eleven of you decide, Hey, we're going to ice this
one guy out and we're just not going to talk
to him. We'll have a separate group thread for that guy,
and then we the eleven real people are real friends,
will have our own thing and then from there to
continue that system. It's a Ponzi scheme of exclusion that
sounds way smarter than it is, but it's very accurate.

Speaker 4 (18:34):
It seems a bit like what's happening with Putin and
Modi and China over there.

Speaker 3 (18:38):
You know, just so, just so, and it happens to
a lot of microcosmics, like on the ground, individual friend groups.
So we know that an example of nationalism threatening democracy,
we can see it in the story of Marine General
Smedley Butler real pos back in the day. He probably

(19:00):
stopped a coup, a fascistic coup to overthrow democracy.

Speaker 4 (19:04):
In the US brad podcast about it that you had
to hand in Ben called Let's start a coup? If
I'm not mistaken. If you want more on that, do
check it out.

Speaker 3 (19:12):
Appreciate it. It's the most unhinged Sesame Street kind of
thing I've ever written, but it's a lot of fun.
Check out the phenomenal actors and our friends at the
School of Humans. And this is where we get to
the questions we're raising. Now we've talked about the US
Japanese parallels, We're going to see a lot of that's
in these conspiracies. Japan has a deep, deep history with

(19:34):
nationalism before the horrors of World War Two. You don't
have to look too far back in your history book
to see the evidence of that. These ultra nationalistic forces
committed heinous atrocities. They rationalized each and every one as
noble ACKs for a greater good Japan first.

Speaker 2 (19:52):
Oh yeah, it's an interesting thing that occurs when nationalism
becomes like the main ideology, because when things are all
about you and us and what we're doing and how
to better us, it often leads that country or that
group or that empire into other places to then make
that stuff them, to make that stuff us right, And

(20:15):
we're talking about resources, we're talking about peoples, We're talking
about a lot of accumulation essentially through let's continue calling
them heinous acts and atrocities.

Speaker 3 (20:26):
Yeah, and this leads us to post World War two Japan.
Post World War two Japan, ever since the close of
the war, has always been a politically conservative democracy, and
you don't have to agree with the policies of the
dominant Liberal Democratic Party, which by the way, is again

(20:47):
just a farcical name. They're not particularly liberal, they're kind
of democratic. They do party though, so one out of three,
one out of three for their name, but the public
also so who votes for them. That's how democracy works.
So you don't have to like that party's policies, but
you do have to recognize that since World War Two,

(21:10):
in modern Japan, these have been, you know, the big dogs.
The most people agree on this party, and they're not
you know, they're not World War two cats. They're not
yelling from the rooftops to invade Banchuria. They're not saying, hey,
let's do hey, you guys, remember war crimes, let's do
some of those. They like global trade, they're not opposed to tourism.

(21:30):
And if you put aside the usual culture wars that
happened there and here in the US, the mainstream LDP
is a lot more like to your question. Note what
we would call center right, the way that the Democratic
Party is a neoliberal center right organization here in the US.

Speaker 2 (21:49):
Interesting, should we talk a little bit just quickly about
the Constitution of Japan?

Speaker 4 (21:54):
I'm interested. I mean, yeah, how did it come around?
How did it come about?

Speaker 3 (21:58):
What?

Speaker 4 (21:58):
You know, who was involved? I imagine there was no
small involvement from perhaps the Allies themselves or no.

Speaker 3 (22:06):
A mandate. There you go, Val Shalt of all intel,
there you go. Yes for a constitution.

Speaker 2 (22:11):
Yeah, there was a constitution in eighteen ninety and it
was the one that the Empire of Japan essentially functioned
upon until the end of World War Two. And you
get this thing called what it's called the Constitution of Japan,
but it's known as a bunch of other things, like
the Peace Constitution or even the MacArthur Constitution, as in

(22:33):
US General MacArthur Constitution. That's probably the best name for it,
because he is the guy who ended up dictating a
lot of what went into.

Speaker 3 (22:41):
It and when he came in post World War two.
I love that you're mentioning that previous document. The eighteen
nineties one is from the Meiji era, and that's when
Japan was undergoing this rapid modernization industrialization. The nation loved

(23:01):
the possibility of new technology, new systems, new processes, new resources,
but they also feared the erosion of traditional values and institutions.
So that first modernization, if we want to play the
reindeer games, that first modernization launched arguably part of or

(23:22):
informed the ultra nationalistic movements that arose and became such
a moving force in the Japanese activities and atrocities during
World War Two, because ever since the Meji era, there's
been this consistent concern about preserving traditional Japanese culture, protecting
it from the from falling prey to the collaborating foreign

(23:46):
hordes of the world outside, which is barbaric because it's
not Japanese.

Speaker 2 (23:50):
Do you guys see any parallel between other island nations
that have empires from Britain what became the United Kingdom
and in Japan here that is an island nation that
is separated pretty fully from anyone else. You've got to
take a ship to get any goods across, to get
culture across one way or the other.

Speaker 4 (24:11):
Yess, it is easier to be isolationists in those situations,
that's for sure.

Speaker 3 (24:15):
Yeah, And those powerful archipelago nations historically are going to
beef up with the nearest mainland while they are culturally interconnected.

Speaker 2 (24:25):
Yes, which is precisely right what happened with Britain over
scores and scores of years there. You think about Spain
and France and the other powers that are right around
that area, and then you think about China and Japan
in particular and other nations that were there that ended
up warring with So it is, I don't know, it's
very interesting because at least in these two instances, you

(24:47):
see tremendous power being built specifically for war for expansionism.

Speaker 3 (24:54):
Right, yeah, hebens thrown. This is a very real historical precedent.
And you know, even in the modern day, let's jump
around in time. Even in the modern day with Japan's LDP,
we see there's a lot of internal dissent and they
argue about a lot of things. And one of the
things that is always up for vigorous debate or what

(25:16):
Corporate America calls healthy conversation, is that MacArthur imposed constitution.
So Uncle Sam kills so many people with world ending
technology and then says, good game. You do this rightly?
You would be pissed as well, right, And that's why

(25:37):
people always argue about revision to the Constitution of Japan,
specifically Article nine. Article nine is the US imposed. Well,
the whole thing's US imposed, but this is the big
tent item for the US and for the allies. It said, hey, Japan,
you can never again wage war to solve a conflict.

(25:59):
You cannot have, you know, a blue water navy or
maritime power. You cannot impose your will upon other entities
in the region through conflict and violence and kinetic war.

Speaker 2 (26:12):
Bluewater navy, that's one that would be able to go
out and impose force further than a certain distance essentially
from the mainland. That's the concept, right.

Speaker 3 (26:21):
Yeah, yeah, brownwater Navy, you can kind of run your coast.
Greenwater Navy, you can futs around in the region, get
up to some Saturday night Shenanigans, right of piracy and
crime or force projection. Bluewater Navy, you can go anywhere
in the world. You're the US and someone in two

(26:43):
Valu is talking mess you can send the boys out,
got it. But also it's very expensive and it's one
of those why would you do it? Things?

Speaker 2 (26:55):
You know?

Speaker 3 (26:55):
Anyway, that's maybe a different story, but the but.

Speaker 2 (26:59):
What you can do is protect yourself, right, you can
have a defense force. That's cool. We're cool with.

Speaker 3 (27:04):
That self defense force. We're joking about this off air
as a treat right, because then you know, rightly, you
have to give a country the ability to at least
defend itself. And this sort of gives lie to the
idea of a Department of Defense in the United States
now Department of now department back to Department of War,
which it was for a long time. But you know,

(27:26):
the argument is, look, we get it says Japan. We're
not going to send out bombers over Vietnam or something, right,
or we're not going to take the Philippines. But if
someone comes and attacks Tokyo, we need to have some
resources to respond. And that seems very reasonable, right, sure.

Speaker 2 (27:46):
As a treat now, and you can have that, and
that's okay, said the US pat But also, but really,
the way this is set up Article N is serious,
and that is one of the reasons, as you said, Ben,
that's like a sticking point. But the rest of it,
in its entirety was made up and created in the

(28:07):
moment following World War Two, after Japan's defeat, and it
was really really was imposed by there was this whole
thing that we can get into where the concept was,
we can have a bunch of smart people who know
the government in Japan get together and make the new constitution.
And they started doing that, but then the US came
in kind of at the last minute and said, well,
actually we're gonna use this one. And it was over

(28:30):
It was overseen by General MacArthur. So just the entirety
of the constitution ends up being this thing that's kind
of held over you if you're you know, a Japanese citizen,
as like, this is how we have to function. Why
does it have to still be like this?

Speaker 3 (28:45):
And it was not written by the people of that country?
Is the important thing the US did. For another analogy,
the US did something executive producers do. Came in and
saw what people are working on and said, great job, guys,
good hustle. I've got some notes. Can you do this?
But completely different and it's my thing, but now it's
yours and you have to do it. Great meeting, all.

Speaker 2 (29:07):
Right, But also it's my thing and my name is
gonna be on it.

Speaker 3 (29:11):
Why don't we just call it the MacArthur Constitution. Anyway,
the other thing they fight about in the LDP is
going to be how foreign policy should work with communist
countries in the region caugh cough, China right, not great
friends of Japan either on either side, So they also
talk about whether this will be important later. A lot
of other folks don't like this. There's a lot of

(29:33):
internal argument over the nature of ties with the United States,
which makes total historical sense, like how cool do you
want to be with these guys?

Speaker 2 (29:43):
Well, barely really cool because you know stuff's booming over
here economically, train all these cars and video game systems
and tech and woo. Yeah, but also, oh wait, what
did those guys do to us?

Speaker 3 (29:55):
Yeah? Also, everything you learn about diplomacy, no matter what
your genre of it is, can boil down to this
sweet till it isn't right. So we also see more
radical beliefs popping up. Anti immigration, like Benja turtles radical.
Those are like like wild off base radical. Sorry, yeah,

(30:18):
this is not bodacious, anti immigration, anti LGBT proposals, the
continual denial of historic war crimes. We've talked about the
idea of preserving culture in Japan or cultural identity which
may be another familiar thing you see a lot of
parallels to in other parts of the world. In recent years,

(30:38):
some very extreme versions of this conservative ideology have become
super powered in Japan, someone somewhat through some high octane
gas on the bonfire. This leads us to the current
far right, a new kid on the block called Santo
Pardner pronunciation.

Speaker 4 (30:58):
I think you did fine, a super conservative ultra nationalist
right wing party that was founded in twenty twenty, very recently. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (31:07):
If the more conservative members of the LDP party in
the Upper House, if they are, if they are caffeine,
then Sanseto is cocaine in terms of the extremity of
their belief And the name is weird. It translates to
the Political Participation Party, but they also use the name

(31:29):
the Party of do it Yourself or the party love
it Amazing.

Speaker 4 (31:34):
Do you get a political participation award for hanging out?

Speaker 3 (31:38):
Yeah? But you have to make it yourself? Okay.

Speaker 4 (31:42):
It's really a lot craft.

Speaker 2 (31:43):
It gives you the feeling the sense of, oh, we
could we could actually decide what happens. You could decide
what happens, right like that. That's a pretty powerful concept
and it feels like something that you could buy into
before you even really understand what the party represents, or
you know what deep waters you're actually waiting into.

Speaker 3 (32:06):
Why can't we be the masters of our fate, the
captains of our souls? Right? Quoting in Victis, they're paraphrasing.
So this party, Sansito, has people worried, diy party whatever
in their worried because there's this crazy political rise to
fame and success from a once fringe party. In some ways,

(32:26):
you could compare it to hanging out in the Midwest
with a friend of a friend or a friend of
your friend's cousin who just smokes weed and tells you
that Jewish space lasers are the world's most dangerous technology.
And now all of a sudden, that guy and his
buddies are in office. That's how people are reacting to

(32:48):
some of this. And the question is a logical question.

Speaker 2 (32:52):
Yes, thinking about that one person from Georgia who has
said those things.

Speaker 3 (32:56):
Yeah, that one person. There's this question, right, how did
this It's a logical one. How did this small group
has often dismissed as fringe and weing nuts and what
have you. How do they gain so much power so
much influence, so much attention over such a short span
of time, which we'll get into. And despite their xenophobic

(33:17):
stances against all foreign powersliar right right parallels, as we said,
critics alleged this might all be a front that indeed
certain foreign powers are funding this party as helping this
They're helping this party to succeed, not because they want

(33:37):
Japan to succeed overall, but because it's part of a
long term conspiratorial scheme to weaken Japan from within. Oh God,
the home parallels. That's our ad break. Here's where it

(33:58):
gets crazy. All right, right parallels. As we're getting I
think we're going to find a lot of these as
we continue. Can we kick a little bit of the
origin story of Sanseto? Absolutely so.

Speaker 4 (34:10):
For three years since Sayto existed as a little tiny
opposition party, holding just a single seat in Japan's two
hundred and forty eight seat upper house, also called the
House of Councilors. This changed in the recent election of
July twentieth, when Sanseeto walked away with a whopping fourteen

(34:30):
new seats in the House.

Speaker 3 (34:33):
And this is not a this goes back to our
European comparison, you can have coalition parties, right, so you
can have a group of some people get you know,
X amount of seats, some other group gets wide amount
of seats and they team up and agree to largely
vote together. That doesn't really happen in US democracy because

(34:56):
we're a young country and we're still trying to figure
stuff out.

Speaker 2 (34:59):
Yeah, quickly, let's talk about that diet thing because it'll
help us understand that upper house, because there's an upper
house in a lower house. Upper house, the House of
Councilors feels a lot like the Senate to me, although
it's not the same thing.

Speaker 3 (35:12):
It's not the same thing, but the diet is Congress
house of Councilors. Yeah, let's think of it as the
Senate exactly.

Speaker 2 (35:20):
And then you've got you have another house of representatives,
which is the lower House, which is it's very interesting.
There are four and eighty members in that house. But
I was looking through I think it's the official website
of the Prime Minister of Japan, and the way it's
described here, I'm just going to say this out loud
just so we hear it and then maybe we can

(35:40):
break it down. Sure, so there are foreign eighty members
of the House of Representatives. Three hundred are elected from
the single seat constituencies, and one hundred and eighty by
their proportional representation system, in which the nation is divided
into eleven electoral blocks, which.

Speaker 4 (35:56):
According to Sary, dissimilar to the way we do things, right,
is it?

Speaker 2 (36:00):
Is it kind of that way? I don't Maybe I
just don't understand voting blocks.

Speaker 4 (36:05):
And there's districts and redistricting and you know, all that stuff,
and proportional representation over here. I mean, it seems like
it has some things in common, but I might be oversimplifying.

Speaker 2 (36:15):
So yeah, that would go into some of the redistricting
stuff that we're seeing in the news, where a certain representative,
you know, represents X people within these lines.

Speaker 3 (36:24):
That kind of thing.

Speaker 2 (36:24):
Okay, that makes sense. So then the House of Councilors,
the total membership, at least according to this website of
the House of Councilors says two hundred and forty two, says,
ninety six of those are elected the proportional representation system,
and then one hundred and forty six from forty seven
different prefectural constituencies. And again, like I don't understand all
of that stuff. But it is important to know that

(36:46):
term office for someone in the House of Councilors is
six years.

Speaker 3 (36:50):
Yeah, and again, proportional representation is going to be familiar
to anybody thinking of the House of Reps here in
the United States, where in the number of Congress folks
you get is based on the population.

Speaker 4 (37:03):
Yeah, people alway talking about, oh, we picked up a
new seats, you know, because the population changed or whatever.
And then there's of course even obviously not super hard
to detect ways of trying to manipulate that, you know.

Speaker 3 (37:15):
And yeah, mister mander Jerry has entered the chat. So
how do we explain this meteoric rise from one seat
for three years to all of a sudden in a
recent just an election a few months ago, now we
got fourteen seats, and this can make a big difference,
especially when you have coalition systems. We can't ignore the

(37:38):
COVID nineteen pandemic.

Speaker 4 (37:40):
It shook up a lot of stuff in a lot
of places.

Speaker 3 (37:43):
And it put a lot of people in a situation
where they were much more vulnerable to the mechanisms of
online disinformation. And this is where we see Sanseto really
rolling up with.

Speaker 4 (37:57):
Some big dice and again how familiar.

Speaker 3 (38:01):
Parallels. Everything is precedent and a lot of these things
are sadly similar. The Japanese public, like the rest of
the world, is locked away, and this political movement blows
up on the Internet partially as a result, they're just
more eyes on more screens. Their members get known for
trumpeting conspiracy theories about vaccinations, anti Semitism, revisionist history, and more,

(38:26):
and they find an audience. Huge percentage of their voting
demographic is going to be young eighteen to thirty year
old male searching for alternatives to the status quo because
the economy is rough right. Earlier generations, you could get
a job for life at a large corporation, but younger
folks are having a much more difficult time finding long

(38:48):
term substantive employment.

Speaker 2 (38:50):
Well, we talked about how serious school is taken in
Japan culturally, and just how much pressure is on each
individual student to like truly fully succeed to get to
go to secondary school or higher degree, to continue on
to get that good job.

Speaker 4 (39:08):
Right well, and with that almost a guarantee within that
system of getting that career that you were promised of
carrying forth that legacy.

Speaker 3 (39:16):
Which is why suicide rates tend to spike after people
receive their final exam grades and their college acceptance letters.

Speaker 2 (39:24):
Yes, but you also see this thing happening in Japan
and the United States and across the world where the
older generation of folks is staying around for much longer now,
right to run corporations, to you know, be in that
job that would be the next jump up, so that
you could get new people in to hire. Within government,
the old guard is sticking around.

Speaker 3 (39:46):
Right, well, yeah, yeah, what by saying stick around, we
mean that they're retiring later, Yes.

Speaker 2 (39:52):
But people are retired later. But you've also got folks,
you know, we're talking about how often you have to
get re elected to a term, right, either six years
if you're in the upper House, four years if you're
in the lower House. And they're seeing people stick around
there and get re elected over and over and over again,
and you can imagine the view of it's time to
switch these people out. Yeah, no, you know, And that's

(40:13):
a base belief without any of the other stuff on
top of it, just that feeling.

Speaker 3 (40:17):
Right, and it's a universal feeling too. Right. Your time's up,
old man, Let me take the stick. That kind of
thing again, they'll say no, very few of them saying yes,
even if they're talking directly to their own scion. But
in addition, because of these economic factors, we see that
marriage is difficult, right, Raising children is a hefty financial proposition,

(40:42):
buying a home, these are all much more difficult to accomplish.
And there's still, of course, this conservative milieu that says, hey,
you as a woman can't You can't have a kid
and have a job, right, Or you as a dude,
right when you get your forever job, when you become
one of those vaunted aspirational salarymen. Well, your family kind

(41:06):
of exist on the weekends, okay, and everybody be cool.
And a lot of people are saying, oh wait, hang on,
I'm a human being that's actually not super cool. And
these are understandable problems.

Speaker 2 (41:18):
That's the response.

Speaker 3 (41:20):
Right.

Speaker 4 (41:20):
Well, we even talked about, like within that culture, how
some very interesting entrepreneurial situations pop up, like companies that
will quit your job for you so that you don't
have to face your boss or even Ben, I think
you and I were talking offline about this, companies that
will like disappear you if you've shamed your family or whatever,
like so you can live off the grid and not

(41:41):
have to you know, be ridiculed and may be seen
as a failure.

Speaker 3 (41:45):
Yeah, they'll obscure your trail. And it's it's not illegal
to disappear folks. As we talked in the past, the
concept of pseudo side is dicey, but just leaving, just
sort of laying down away from society. There's nothing illegal
about that, as long as you aren't ditching out on

(42:07):
debts and as long as you're not trying to get
money by faking your death. So we can't blame a
lot of people in very competitive environments for just getting
tired and burned out. And you vote with your actions,
ever since the beginning of tribes, that's the number one
way people vote. And when we see that perspective, we
see that a lot of Japanese nationals are voting with

(42:31):
their actions by saying, well, why would I bother get married?
Why would I sign up for this hellish Sisyphian life
of working till I die, right and then barely seeing
a kid and then yelling at the kid when I
do see them. So as a result, birth rates are plummeting.

(42:51):
Even the popular media accuses other countries of trying to
besmirch Japan's culture and reputation. You click on you know,
you're hanging out somewhere, right and isekaya or a hotel
room or something. You see the news, the local news,
and there's this heavy implication that the world is telling
you it is wrong for you to be Japanese. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (43:15):
We also see in parallel to that a massive rise
and popularity of Japanese cultural things. Yes, yes, in other places,
which is just a very interesting notion to have those
two movements occurring together.

Speaker 3 (43:31):
Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. Every country is a land of contradictions, right,
and this is I love this point because it brings
us to more parallels. Here Amid COVID nineteen right, Sanseto
hits the zeitgeist. They urge potential voters to be proud
of your ethnicity and culture. There's nothing inherently wrong with that,

(43:54):
except when it leads to racism and things like white
supremacy and so on. They also pivot and they say,
you know how your life is tough and you're kind
of unhappy and unsatisfied. Well, it's not due to the
economics of Japan itself. Really, Instead, it's due to these foreigners,
these immigrant hordes. The phrase they use over and over

(44:17):
again is silent invasion. It's due to these globalists who
are messing with something that would have been fine if
we never said yes to the Portuguese in the first place. Basically,
so they say, is the motto Japan First.

Speaker 4 (44:35):
Huh Sorry, It's almost like they got the idea from
somebody who also got the idea from somebody. This is
just a pattern, I mean, this rise of nationalism and
then words like patriot or nationalists almost beginning to have
a dog whistle feel to them, you know, for xenophobic

(44:55):
or a racist.

Speaker 3 (44:56):
Yeah. And to your point there, the reason sounds familiar
is because this party, the DIY Party, explicitly notes the
phrase Japan First was inspired by the current US President
Donald Trump. Okay, so they're there a secret. They're saying,
we think this is a pretty cool idea. Yeah wow.

(45:20):
And then they continue with international racism, not really targeting,
not really targeting like Canadians and US folks and other
folks from the anglosphere. Although they hate Australian tourists. Sorry, guys,
there's a reputation that was someone earned.

Speaker 2 (45:39):
But they how do they feel about American tours seriously, like,
what what have you experienced?

Speaker 4 (45:44):
Ben?

Speaker 2 (45:44):
I mean, just what have you experienced traveling through Japan?
It does has it been? Doesn't seem like he's been
negative at all?

Speaker 3 (45:53):
Uh No, No, usually there for specific reasons. Always it
depends on where you go, right, So you go to Tokyo,
it's like you're going to New York or London. People
are too busy, right in general, I will say in
Tokyo there's a little bit more of an emphasis on
helping folks who may clearly seem out of their depth.

(46:16):
So the public transit is awesome, right, It's worlds away,
streets ahead, as community would say, but it can be
very confusing if you don't know where you're going, right,
because it's essentially a circulatory system for a country. So
there's this whole cottage industry of volunteers, often older people,
often older dudes. They don't necessarily work for the transit system,

(46:39):
but they pick a day out of the week and
then just hang out at the station and they help
people figure out where to go. It's a pretty beautiful thing.
And you know, I'll tell you it probably wouldn't happen
in Boston.

Speaker 4 (46:51):
Well, and my understanding too is that in general, people
there are pretty and to your pointment in the bigger cities,
pretty helpful to tourists and not always doing it for money.
You know, they're proud of their city, and I think
tourism is obviously big money there, and it does not
seem to my eyes anyway that there's a resentment like
you might see in places like Barcelona.

Speaker 3 (47:13):
And yeah, it's also very much a well, it's not
an overt yelling society unless someone's having a bad day
and they assume that you don't know any Japanese. But
there's also an intense, relatively skin based hierarchy. So if
you are a lighter skinned person from the US, you

(47:36):
are going to be treated differently, and you're probably going
to be there's going to be a slightly more friendly
attitude towards you than if you were a darker skinned person.
And you know, like in rural areas, I've never had
an issue in cities, I've never had an issue because
I'm a huge believer in the idea that energy is

(47:57):
a two way street. You know, so if you are
respectful with some one right and you are understanding the
boundaries that they may have, and you put just a
little bit of time in to figuring out how to
not look like it. It's going to go a long,
long way, dude.

Speaker 4 (48:13):
That's the key to life right there, My friends, don't
be in like read the room. Don't make you know
it's good.

Speaker 3 (48:20):
But I have seen to your to your question direct,
I have seen. I have seen people who are just
tired of all these tourists, especially in very tourists heavy
cities like Kyoto at certain times of year. There's more
of an exasperation than like hostility, right, yes, But exasperation
is a cousin of hostility, It's true, you know. And

(48:41):
the one of the big complaints, for instance, that you
will see in this galvanized Sanseeto as well, is the
idea of, hey, these tourists are crowding all of the
trains and the buses. I'm not here for, you know,
insert festival. I live here and I have to get

(49:02):
to work on time, and I can't get on the
bus because of all these gosh dart And then they'll
insert a phrase, and that phrase I mean often often
the discrimination the complaints are going to be centered on
Singaporean and Chinese nationals. More America make sauces. Yeah, it's deep,

(49:22):
it goes deep.

Speaker 2 (49:23):
But we also see something parallel here with like what's
happening in Spain. I think we've just mentioned that with
housing prices rental homes, yes, and crowding people out of
their own city, yeah, and pricing people out mm hmm.

Speaker 3 (49:36):
Yeah exactly. And with this we have to realize there
is already like this didn't come from a vacuum. There's
already a lot of emphasis placed on who is Japanese, right,
And we're speaking as non Japanese people to be clear
who is Japanese and who is not and the indefinable
but inescapable differences between the two. I'd like to give

(50:00):
a shout out for anybody's interested in learning more about
this stuff. Check out our friend Miles's show on The
Daily Zeitgeist. Miles has Japanese and African American heritage, Miles
speaks Japanese. He is well suited to remark on this
and be fascinating to hear his view on Japan's far right.

Speaker 2 (50:18):
But you think we could ever get him on like
that'd be interesting to do this episode with him on
something like this.

Speaker 3 (50:24):
It depends on what we want to talk about with him. Okay, okay, yeah,
but yeah we should check in. Yeah, we'll see. These
are busy guys because their show comes out literally every day,
a couple of times, a couple times every day. Wow. Yeah,
So there's another there's another fact here that we should mention.
If you are not considered Japanese, if you're considered a

(50:45):
foreigner by the Japanese government, you can become a foreign resident.
You can even with enough time and effort, become a
Japanese passport holder. But the word for you that people
will use for you does not translate to Japanese, translates
to foreigner with a Japanese passport.

Speaker 2 (51:03):
Well, that makes sense, it does.

Speaker 3 (51:05):
It's descriptive. I don't know, it's a bit of a day.

Speaker 4 (51:09):
It's a bit of a day, right, there's no question.

Speaker 3 (51:11):
It's just very like you will never be you will
never exactly. And so people are, you know, looking around
at all these terrible economic challenges. You know, I can't
get on the bus. This is I'm not doing anything special.
I'm just trying to go to work. Very understandable stuff.
These tours are rude to me right out in Golden
Gey or whatever. But then we have to ask, is

(51:34):
there an immigration crisis? Is there a silent invasion of foreigners?
And that doesn't seem to be the case.

Speaker 4 (51:42):
We asked that same question over here, and I mean,
there are a lot of people that have similarly on
paper reasonable complaints about immigration here in the United States.
But is it a crisis? Not necessarily, but it's certainly
a way to rile up a particular base. And they
seem like talking point.

Speaker 3 (52:00):
Yeah, exactly again parallels.

Speaker 2 (52:03):
But often talking points that will rile people up action
enough to take. Actually, yes, exactly, but not necessarily based
in truth.

Speaker 3 (52:14):
Right, don't hit the analytical part of the brain, hit
the emotive part of the brain, right, get that primal
stuff cooking, And that's that's what happens. We see if
you go to the Streets Times, Japan's foreign residency rows
ten in twenty twenty four. Right, that's a big rise.
That means the total population of permanent foreign residents is

(52:36):
three point seven six million. That's a little over three
percent of the population.

Speaker 2 (52:42):
WHOA, that's not much.

Speaker 3 (52:43):
That's not much at all. No, and keep in mind,
a lot of those folks who are foreign residents are
highly skilled workers. For instance, right, a lot of them
are there because a big to do company specifically wanted
them there. Right, those kids who are out doing English
teaching programs are not going to end up being for

(53:08):
permanent residents, you know, They're not gonna end up getting
that dubious distinction of foreign or with the Japanese passport.
They're going to eventually skid outle off or maybe marry somebody.

Speaker 2 (53:20):
I'll tell you, guys, I really did have dreams of that, yeah,
of living in Japan. Yeah. And I don't know why
that's instilled. Did you guys ever experience that when you
were younger, Like the feeling or the concept or the
I don't know. It felt like a really interesting place.

Speaker 4 (53:38):
For me, but I definitely understand the romanticization of a
place like that when you're younger.

Speaker 2 (53:41):
For sure, it was specifically Tokyo because and it was
something about I don't know, pop culture at the time.
I blame Ninja Turtles.

Speaker 5 (53:50):
I don't know why, because everything looks like the future
radicalized you bro exactly, And a lot of people share
that about any other number of places.

Speaker 3 (54:01):
Right. Part of growing up is going somewhere else in
some shape, form or fashion, and so everybody has. I
think that that impetus. And as long as you are
realistic about it, when you're there and you're respectful, then
people are usually going to be cool with you. To
show that we're not casting this version on Japan in

(54:22):
particular or even Americans. This happens in Paris all the time.
There's actually a word called, or a term called Paris syndrome,
which is somewhat common among female identified Japanese nationals who
dream of going to Paris because France is a huge
deal culturally. And then they get to Paris, right that
they see the needles and the graffiti they used condoms,

(54:45):
someone picks their pocket and they break the heck down
because this was not what AMAI told them.

Speaker 4 (54:51):
What happened, Well, they should call unwanted Parisian tourists parasites.

Speaker 3 (54:58):
I love it.

Speaker 2 (54:59):
You're on fire today, dude, shout out to parasite for
South Korean film to be amazing. Memen talking about breaking
the mold there, breaking out of all that money in Stepwell, I.

Speaker 3 (55:11):
Don't know for sure. Well, yeah, well there's also you know,
I'm glad to bring that up because they're also similar
socioeconomic dynamics at play in the Republic of Korea and
South Korea anyway, So a little over three percent of
the population foreign residents. Inarguably, this is a growth pattern.

(55:32):
And the leader of Sanseeto again this just started in
twenty twenty. He's a guy named Sohe Kameya, and he
uses statistics like this to stoke those public fears of
foreign hordes evading the nation. And then in the same
conference he'll say, I mean, obviously we're not going to
discriminate against folks.

Speaker 2 (55:51):
No, no, no, that's just a problem. But you know,
it's a problem, it's a common problem.

Speaker 3 (55:55):
Yeah, we're civilized. I'm just saying they're barbarians. Geez, I'm
just saying they're terrible. Everybody calmed down. Uh yeah, that's
what's again parallels and but.

Speaker 2 (56:10):
It's it's it's so strange to see that when the
rhetoric is kind of like that, we saw it similarly
here in the US, and then to see the actions
taking place with ice and homeland security and all like
all the things that are occurring right now that I
don't know about you guys, but to me, as almost
an observer, now what's happening, you feel a little bit

(56:31):
powerless to now watch it happening because it was posed
as this. It's just that, you know, we're just we're
just saying these things. We're just talking about these things.
We think these things. Doesn't mean we're gonna do anything about.

Speaker 3 (56:43):
This is just an issue we need to collectively acknowledge, right, Yeah,
And you see this a lot in Europe as well,
in the European theater. It's happening all over the place,
and the leaders of this political party will say, look,
we're just saying we need to be aware some we
all need to get together on and as a team,

(57:05):
as a nation, we can address this somehow. The reason
our platform is actually so popular is because we want
to cut taxes, we want to boost public spending, and
we want to protect jobs. Foreigners are taking all our jobs.
This conference is over. So we see it everywhere. I mean,
far right parties are on the rise in Europe, parts

(57:27):
of Africa, definitely South America. I was surprised, as I'm
sure all of us were, when Bolsonaro actually got sentenced
to prison. Yeah, that was wild. I didn't see that happening.

Speaker 4 (57:37):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (57:37):
Well, then France's government collapsed just like a couple of
days ago. We're just seeing all kinds of craziness up.

Speaker 3 (57:47):
Yeah, the heaves are up. And so some people will argue,
even and this is observation, some people will argue that
the Make America Great Again movement here in the UN
is itself a far right movement. Your perception of that
may vary. But the big question now is could organic

(58:07):
popular support from the Japanese people alone could not explain
the massive wins of this thing that, just until July
was a wing nut, fringe political party. So why has
san Seto succeeded where so many other similar Japanese movements,
very similar movements failed. Right time, right place, right, Hey,

(58:27):
we'll tackle it after a word from our sponsors, and
we've returned. So the big question foreign funding and interference.
Around the time of that recent July election, an analyst
named Ichiu Yamamoto from a Guy, a smart guy from
a think tank called the Japan Institute of Law and

(58:49):
Information Systems went viral and he said, I have hard
evidence that Russia, a foreign power, is heavily invested in
this anti foreign power movement.

Speaker 2 (59:02):
Wait, wait a say, are we saying Russia is directly
putting money into campaigns or are they doing stuff that
they were alleged to have done here in the US previously.

Speaker 3 (59:16):
Right. Yeah, and one blog post he claims to have
hard evidence that quote, anti government propaganda by Russian bought
accounts was what made this small far right party so
popular leading up to the election. And then he outlines
the process, which is going to sound very familiar to
a lot of us.

Speaker 4 (59:35):
This is what he had to say. Russian bought accounts,
bought accounts on various social media platforms including x TikTok
and Instagram, have been spreading false information and criticism about
major government officials, including Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba and Foreign
Minister Takashi Iwaya, to manipulate public impressions.

Speaker 3 (59:55):
Yeah, so spam the online comms, which hacks the alg
rhythm and gets that post or that conversation further up,
increasing the chances that will meet a sympathetic stranger, gain
a large number of likes, spread to more and more users,
despite no whatever fact checking it. Beautiful, brilliant evil. He

(01:00:16):
also notes these candidates from this party are appeared on
Russian government media, which is true. Really Yeah, yeah, make
Japan great again. Yeah. And then there are the allegations
to your question mat about dark money from Russia in
a way that is very difficult to trace.

Speaker 2 (01:00:38):
It always makes me wonder about the local level when
money can sneak in there and then find its way
up right, rather than in a high profile way come
in to the people who are actually running for the
House of Counselors something.

Speaker 3 (01:00:52):
That's exactly what it is. It has not been conclusively
proven any of these allegations for or dark money, but
it is much easier to trace national level financial shenanigans
than the local stuff. And again, the reason we keep
saying they're parallels is because large scale election influencers like

(01:01:15):
the Koch brothers here in the United States and in
other parts of the anglosphere, but to a much lesser degree,
they met with a lot of success funding local politicians
for decades in the United States because they don't have
term limits, they just hire the people who have term limits,
They buy them and puppeteer them.

Speaker 2 (01:01:35):
Well, yeah, and the people who end up making rules
and regulations within like a small sector of the US
where let's say a factory is or where a business
is run, which ends up being a huge deal for
somebody you like the Cooch brothers. But then if you're
dealing with actual interference from another country, it makes you

(01:01:59):
wonder why would you do that, right.

Speaker 3 (01:02:01):
If you are so anti foreign influence. If not in
Japanese residents are a silent invasion, then isn't dark money
in info war from a foreign power also a silent invasion?
Isn't that the influence you were talking about being bad earlier? Yep,
you know, maybe we didn't catch the right press briefing,

(01:02:21):
but we want to be fair. The leaders of Sunseto
have denied any and all allegations. The leader So High
Kama was pressed about this on July fifteenth, and they said, hey, seriously,
break it down. In Moscow man, you mess with you
mess with Moscow money. He said, you know, do you

(01:02:44):
have ties to him? And he said, we don't, not
at all, not with Russia, not with China, not with America.
We do not. We keep balanced diplomacy with any country.
And just because some of my folks appeared on Russian
media doesn't mean we're suddenly pro Russia. And they said, okay, yeah,
we'd like to read some your earlier statements about your
support for Russia. Just like while we're on this topic.

(01:03:06):
So he got caught in the interview because he was
on record supporting Russia's role in the Ukraine invasion or
supporting the Russian argument for that. And we'll give you
a quote so you can see how he responded.

Speaker 2 (01:03:20):
Yeah, upon seeing all of that, right being presented with
it in the moment, he replied, quote, Russia's military invasion was,
of course bad, but there are forces in the US
that drove Russia into doing that. So I said once
that it's not fair to say Russia is the only
bad guy here. And then people began saying I'm pro Russia, right.

Speaker 3 (01:03:42):
Just for being so pro Russia. Yeah, I mean from
but yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:03:47):
On the surface, we know from our previous explorations of
the situation happening in Ukraine right now between Russia, about
the complicated nature and the history right of ownership over
that land, of all of that stuff, Like, we know
it's more complicated than there's a good guy, there's a
bad guy.

Speaker 3 (01:04:06):
But but it is.

Speaker 2 (01:04:10):
It's one of those things when you get involved in
that kind of thing, even to make a public statement
about it, especially on one of the country's medias, it
does seem to show some bias.

Speaker 3 (01:04:23):
Yeah, from his perspective, he's being fair and balanced, right,
he said, I am a statesman from Japan, so I
don't have necessarily a horse in the race, which makes
me more objective. Right. It's you guys who are brainwashed
and influenced. I'm not being paid or influenced by some conspiracy.
So what does the official Japanese government make of this?

(01:04:45):
They'll buy it, spoiler, They don't buy what he say.
They think Russia's up to something. They recently said through
the deputy Chief Cabinet secretary. They said Japan is working
on the premise that they're being targeted by foreign luin's operations.
They think something is screwy and the aw yeah and
just and in.

Speaker 2 (01:05:05):
The cabinet, by the way, is like the executive branch
within the Japanese government.

Speaker 3 (01:05:10):
Yeah yeah, yeah, yeah, they're the c suite. And on
July sixteenth, just four days before the election, he also
said the same cabinet secretary said Japan is a target
of foreign election interference. Low and behold, this once cartoonishly
obscure political party walks away with the biggest growth of

(01:05:33):
any Japanese political party in recent history. It makes you wonder,
makes you wonder.

Speaker 2 (01:05:40):
Yeah, but surely it's just the grassroots movement of do
it yourself attitude, rightey Man booststraps.

Speaker 3 (01:05:48):
Yeah, power to the people, that's what you say in
Saint Petersburg. We also know we're talking about this a
little bit off air. You can go to Japan in
many cities, rural areas, you'll see something called the Yoko Dantai. Uh.
These are far right activists, internaturals, dudes with honestly sick fans.

(01:06:08):
They converted their vans and they have flames on them.
They got skulls, they got old carbon propaganda. They've got
these amazing loud speaker systems they roll through towns and
protests and uses. They got charter buses. They've got all
these propaganda slogans. They'll sing patriotic songs.

Speaker 4 (01:06:28):
So they're well funded.

Speaker 3 (01:06:31):
Someone's funded by whom.

Speaker 4 (01:06:32):
Yeah, that's okay, we're on the same page. It was
because things ain't cheap. But it sounds like they're new.
It's not like a ragtag you know, right, They've.

Speaker 3 (01:06:42):
Been around for decades, but they now appear to have
garnered much more funding.

Speaker 4 (01:06:48):
That would make sense.

Speaker 3 (01:06:49):
Yeah, So they implore the public to stand up for Japan.
I actually got a high five from one of these
guys because I was just standing around in Hokkaido and
I didn't know what they were saying. I was like,
these guys know how to throw a party. Five me back.

Speaker 4 (01:07:06):
It's not that kind of party, ben, is it.

Speaker 2 (01:07:09):
Yeah?

Speaker 3 (01:07:10):
I hope that doesn't come back to haunt me. But
they're they're talking about ridding the Great Nation of forid invaders, leeches,
and parasites. And they're usually when they're saying that, to
be explicit, they're usually talking about people from other Asian
countries that they don't like, you know, like Korean descended
populations who have lived in Japan for generations, generations, right,

(01:07:32):
and they're talking about often darker skinned people especially. They're
talking about how they don't like Chinese people. Their cause
is galvanized. They're gaining new followers, more influence, bigger say
in government, and they're aligning with one of our favorite
secret textbooks, Alexander Dugan's Foundation of Geopolitics Dun Dun Dum.

Speaker 2 (01:07:54):
We did a whole episode on Alexander Dugan.

Speaker 3 (01:07:56):
Yeah, yeah, the alex Jones of his time.

Speaker 4 (01:08:00):
Dugan. That's different, that's do check that out if you
all aren't familiar Longmont potion Castle, it's these absurdist like
proto jerky Boy but way more psychedelic prank kind of
phone calls. And there's one where there's a character he's
talking about named Dugan Nash.

Speaker 2 (01:08:16):
Sorry, well totally, that's amazing. The episode we did was
called does Russia Have a New Resputant? And I believe
you could find it from twenty nineteen.

Speaker 3 (01:08:26):
Yeah, well it's still up. We hope it is. This book,
do check out our episode on it, which if you
really listen to it, it's kind of frightening. But this
book is made by guy who's kind of often called
in a cult wing nut right, who just sat down

(01:08:50):
and made a bunch of opinions and directions for Russia
to re emerge as the world's primary superpower and so
as a laundry list of stuff that the Russian government
should do across the planet, largely to weaken and attack
the United States asymmetrically. And he breaks it up into

(01:09:14):
different spheres what we call regions, right, the East African sphere,
you know, the East Asian theater, stuff like that, And
his idea for Japan was not that you attack Japan
directly you try to sanction them or something which Russia
would have a hard time doing, but instead that you
manipulate their internal domestic politics and culture. You maybe give

(01:09:39):
them a deal, You give them the Kurral Islands, which
are very north in Japan, and then you use that
leverage and that descent you have created to remove Japan
from the International Board, other than supporting your causes and
saying like, hey, there's not really a good guy or
a bad guy in Ukraine. Oh yeah, it's working.

Speaker 2 (01:10:03):
You know all of this when thinking about the context
of what just happened during Victory Day in China and
the coalition of forces that are building there and the
movements and some of the public statements specifically by Jijinping
and some of the leaders there, you can see you

(01:10:25):
can see movements occurring, and it feels like this could
be a big part of that.

Speaker 3 (01:10:32):
Yeah, absolutely right. You can see. The question is are
we recognizing a pattern or are we manufacturing one to
fit our own assumptions, And that's always a very difficult
question to answer at this point in the game. But however,
they came to prominence, this political party, Japan's far right,
and their allies. They're having a field day, and no

(01:10:55):
one is sure what is going to happen next. We know,
politics always a sensitive issue, especially now here in the States,
and that's because voting and civic action and activism it's
largely been replaced by the dopamine casino cycle of social media.
You know, it's difficult, it's pickle because we have to ask,

(01:11:19):
is this a case of a nation truly speaking its
own voice, not just in Japan but in every country
especially now. If it is true, if this is organic democracy,
then we don't have to love it. We only have
to acknowledge it is democracy, and that's how it's supposed
to work, for better or worse. But there are serious,

(01:11:40):
dangerous questions about how much of this is actually organic
and how much instead is the stuff they don't want
you to know.

Speaker 2 (01:11:48):
I certainly think it is well in our previous episodes
and explorations of specifically what the United States would do
to weaken another country when they would go into Latin America,
South America, in certain countries in Africa, it is the
exact thing that we're looking at here and in parallel
in the United States, where you weaken the internal systems

(01:12:09):
and the human beings that are supposed to govern those systems,
and the culture and politics and all of that stuff.
As you're weakening all of that, it means the governing bodies,
the decision makers at the top, are not going to
be as strong, and they're not going to have the
will of the people behind them to do certain things.
Doesn't it feel exactly like that's what's happening, Whether it's

(01:12:32):
whether it's occurring from within or from some exterior force,
it feels like that's the very thing that's happening across
the world in places like Japan and the.

Speaker 4 (01:12:39):
And it's happened before, and it's happening again.

Speaker 3 (01:12:42):
It's cyclical. M M. Yeah. We cannot. We cannot further
emphasize that you should check out Foundations of Geopolitics or
at least our episode audit. And it's important to ask
these questions because eroding trust in institutions, whether or not
those institutions deserve to lose that trust, is the first

(01:13:04):
step too massive upheaval. And that is not just the
stuff they don't want you to know. It is the
stuff that happens continually over centuries, over millennia, and this
modern Millennia is indeed no different except for one thing.
We've got a podcast now and we want you to
be part of it. So let us know, help us,

(01:13:27):
help us understand the course of history, the past president
in the future by giving us a call on a telephone.
You could, of course always get a random fact from
us if you email us any time, and you can
find us on the lines.

Speaker 4 (01:13:41):
That's right, you can find us on the lines. The
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you got for them.

Speaker 2 (01:13:56):
We've got a phone number for you. It's one eight
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Speaker 4 (01:14:04):
Call the number.

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