Populism in Regional Japan: Where is the "Revenge of the Places That Don't Matter"?

Long facing declining wages and rising inequality, LDP governments have walked an electorally successful, but often unpopular, tight balance between neoliberal deregulation and seemingly pro-labor and pro-welfare state policies all throughout the “lost decades”. Since 2019, under the leadership of the charismatic former actor and prominent anti-nuclear energy activist Yamamoto Tarō, a new left-wing project, the Reiwa Shinsengumi, aims to break the conservative hegemony dominant in Japan. It has emphasized a lack of state intervention and spending, highlighting the LDP’s and the establishment’s responsibility for a variety of social ills befalling “the suppressed people” ever since the asset bubble burst of 1989.
Utilizing a discourse-theoretical approach to populism based on the works of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, I aim to elucidate the novelty of this project and by comparing it to previous iterations of left-wing politics, explain potentials and constraints. Additionally, the specific nature of Japan’s political party landscape, as well as social movements and electoral systems in Japan make the Japanese context a previously untested field for a left-wing populist strategy, as put forward by some of its foundational thinkers..

A growing body of literature investigates the link between rural peripheralization and (right-wing) populism. Japan is curiously absent from this debate: Although large parts of rural Japan have been facing a multi-dimensional process of peripheralization, there seems to be no rural populist counter movement – if anything, the most recent general election in October 2021 confirmed that populism in Japan is more likely to take the form of “neoliberal” metropolitan movements, while the LDP remains successful in more rural constituencies. Most explanations for this peculiar pattern highlight the traditional rural orientation of the LDP, which has long been catering to the interests of well-organized and overrepresented voters in rural and semi-urban areas. Since the electoral reform in the mid-1990s and a wave of municipal mergers in the mid-2000s, however, there are more and more signs that the LDP is gradually growing apart from its rural base. This paper asks whether the image of the LDP as the party of rural Japan still holds up. Based on a detailed analysis of municipal-level electoral and socio-economic data, we investigate voting behavior in peripheralized rural areas – so called depopulating regions, or kaso chiiki – in the four general elections since 2012 to identify electoral trends (a “populist potential”) that so far remain hidden behind the LDP’s continuous success.

What does it mean to be a “populist” politician or candidate at subnational level? How are “elites” and “the people” defined differently at subnational level compared to the national level, either in urban or rural settings? Moreover, can we meaningfully identify and measure populism in political contexts with limited partisan conflict and cleavages different from the national level?
This talk seeks to consider these questions based on evidence from Japanese gubernatorial and mayoral elections. It will briefly highlight findings from past research: analyses of the political discourse of high-profile governors’ and over key contested policy issues at municipal level which touch upon subnational populism. It will then introduce preliminary analyses of some 650 chief executive manifestos over 270 elections to measure and interpret how certain “populist” terms and phrases are employed by both mayoral and gubernatorial candidates of different local government sizes, partisan affiliation, and urban-ness.
In both rural and urban contexts, there are signs of a populist discourse pitting a corrupt/indifferent elite against virtuous/under-represented local residents. Yet I find little evidence of anti-pluralist, anti-liberal, anti-metropolitan elements. I suggest that one cannot simply transpose ideologies like populism conceptualized at national level onto subnational politics: Doing so overlooks core issues inherent in subnational politics (local autonomy, regionalism, NIMBYism etc.) which lend themselves to uniquely subnational populist worldviews/rhetoric.

While research on rural populism in Japan is still very much on the to-do list of country specialists and political scientists, the body of academic literature on Japanese populism in general has grown over the last years. Political parties like Ishin no Kai and Reiwa Shinsengumi as well as individual politicians like Hashimoto Toru, Koike Yoriko or Koizumi Jun’ichiro have been analyzed through different conceptual lenses of populism. This presentation will summarize key findings and offer suggestions for the direction future research including that on regional political actors and rural populism may take. In doing so, it will also address the key question of how to approach populism conceptually and where to draw the line between global definitions and uniquely Japanese types of populism.