TOKYO — During Japan’s Feb. 8 national election, Sanseito, one of the newest parties, won 15 seats in the lower chamber of the National Diet, the country’s bicameral legislature. The election of those seats signaled that the fledgling political party would continue to maintain a foothold in government.
Since emerging in 2020, Sanseito has embraced the ideal of “Japanese first,” a slogan that mirrors the “America First” nationalist movement.
While Sanseito may take strategic cues from the Make America Great Again conservative establishment in the United States, its politics are distinctly the party’s own. As the party has grown, certain policy ideals have taken shape, but its origins lie in standing against the status quo led by the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP). Sanseito is a right-wing reaction to economic stagnation, declining births, overtourism and immigrant inflows that the nation has recently faced, plus the potential threat that China represents to the country’s safety and the economy.
Charlie Kirk and a journalist turned politician
Among the party’s members of the Upper House, there is one whose responsibility is to drive foreign political engagement. Elected to the House of Councillors in 2025, Sen Yamanaka serves as chairman of the party’s International Affairs Committee.
“It’s really like they’re losing their tradition and culture. It was a crisis there,” Yamanaka said, referring to the United States before the election of President Donald Trump. “But it’s the same thing happening in Japan. The same thing.”
Yamanaka has close ties with American culture. He attended university in the U.S. in the 1980s to study journalism and then worked on Wall Street. While there, Yamanaka became a follower of President Ronald Reagan’s conservative politics.
During President Joe Biden’s administration, Yamanaka authored two books for Japanese audiences: “End of America” and “Collapse of America.” Yamanaka said he wrote them to translate to his homeland how the U.S. has degraded, particularly through corporate news media.
Yamanaka’s connections and familiarity with the Republican Party was leveraged to gain both external legitimacy and internal attention for Sanseito. Eventually, he was drawn into Sanseito when its current chairman and founder, Sohei Kamiya, asked him to contribute to the party.
“I was not involved at that inception time, but they wanted me to report what was going on in the U.S.,” Yamanaka said.
Charlie Kirk, co-founder of Turning Point USA, visited Yamanaka and others in Tokyo just days before his assasination in September 2025. During the visit, Yamanaka and others in the party brought Kirk to speak to a room full of Sanseito supporters.
The theme of Kirk’s speech then became part of Sanseito’s rallying cry during the following election, and it is what Yamanaka described as “an anti-globalism platform.”
The American influencer spoke about how immigration would destroy Japanese culture, as he claimed it had in the United States and Europe. One of Sanseito’s more significant departures from the LDP is on immigration. If there is a single policy area which defines the party, it is this issue.
“We are not anti-foreigners. We are not xenophobic or anything. We don’t hate foreigners, no, but Japan first,” Yamanaka said.
Where the LDP consensus accepts immigration and short-term workers as necessary, Sanseito takes a dim view of Japan’s current framework.
“The Japanese law itself is still not very good, not at this point, because they [the LDP] didn’t expect so many foreigners to come suddenly at this pace, but they are coming more and more,” Yamanaka said. “The LDP said: ‘we’re doing something controlled,’ but they’re not doing it well.”
Yamanaka referenced blue collar labor, such as in construction and agriculture, as industries which simply aren’t attractive to young Japanese people. He acknowledged that policies are needed to assist these labor sectors, but in a regulated manner.
“We didn’t say anything against shutting down foreign workers, anything like that, but we like to control when they come,” Yamanaka said. “We want to control the number of foreign workers.”
For now, Sanseito does not have a direct path to exerting the type of political influence necessary to execute its Japanese first ideology. However, it is evident what will guide Yamanaka as the legislative session continues.
“We are saying Japan’s original history: the tradition, the culture; you know, Japan’s original language, we really think that’s important,” Yamanaka said. “But especially globalism, they are trying to destroy our value, the core value of thinking of your own country first. That’s wrong.”
The power of online broadcasting
Just like with Turning Point USA, online engagement is a key part of Sanseito’s approach to public relations. In the course of the Borderlands Project reporters’ interview with Yamanaka, he proposed the idea of filming a discussion for his own YouTube channel.
Yamanaka asked the reporters questions about American politics, the Russian-Ukrainian war and Tucker Carlson in his office adorned with MAGA, Turning Point and Sanseito merchandise.
Makoto Mogi is a YouTube influencer who supports Sanseito and has helped its growth. He is a history teacher at a preparatory school in Tokyo and an avid author. He recalled watching the birth of the party during the early rise of Sanseito Chairman Kamiya in the late 2010s.
“Kamiya originally was a city council member. He was a passionate supporter of [former LDP Prime Minister] Shinzo Abe,” Mogi said. “However, after finding out the LDP was completely corrupt, he asked himself: ‘Why are Japanese politicians so obsessed with the idea of profits, but at the same time don’t have any actual ideas?’”
During this temporary departure from politics, Kamiya began creating video content through a platform called Grand Strategy Channel. A video uploaded in April 2013 showed him outlining the purpose of the channel, but also the contours of what would eventually become his own campaign platform.
“As the name suggests, the Grand Strategy channel is about the country’s major strategy and future vision,” Kamiya says in the video. “Through this program, we aim to make things as easy to understand and interesting as possible, and to share information that newspapers and television rarely cover.”
“I also started a YouTube channel around that time,” Mogi said. “And so one day I actually got a message from Kamiya himself.”
Since then, Mogi has made regular appearances on the Grand Strategy Channel, often commenting on Japanese history and occasionally contemporary politics. The rapport continues today, and Mogi served as a lecturer at Sanseito’s political education workshop earlier this year.
The new Japanese right
Party leaders have tried expanding the ranks of the party by bringing in new voices.
“There seems to be a lot of professionals who are joining the party [Sanseito]. There are also people who used to be in the LDP who are showing up in Sanseito as well,” Mogi said.
Six out of the 15 Sanseito members elected to the House of Representatives in February had held political office before. Most of them had working class backgrounds.
“Right now, people who support [Prime Minister Sanae] Takaichi and those who support Sanseito are currently in the middle of a deep cultural argument,” Mogi added.
Takaichi’s electoral popularity helped the LDP to remain in power. According to Mogi, there is a struggle between the establishment party and the party for those who are not satisfied with that status quo.
In the legislative session at the end of 2025, Kamiya worked with other councillors to submit several bills for discussion. These bills covered a variety of topics, from amending the penal code to criminalizing burning the national flag, to a bill establishing a committee to review the country’s implementation of COVID-19 vaccination protocols.
None of these measures passed in a shortened legislative session, the first under the oversight of Takaichi.
According to Mogi, Sanseito is the only choice for those dissatisfied with traditional politics. He said that the LDP’s governance has a long history of false promises and selling out to corporate interests.
For him, the premierships of Yasuhiro Nakasone, Junichiro Koizumi and Abe were a procession of compromises that ended up hurting the Japanese people.
“These so-called patriots basically destroyed the Japanese economy, because they are under the control of foreign capital. And there are many Japanese who are realizing this. Those that realize this are no longer believing in the LDP at all,” Mogi said.
While Sanseito increases its presence in the National Diet and in Japan’s domestic politics, it remains unclear how the party’s leadership will use its growing muscle to advance its goals.
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