No one likes a “gotcha” moment, especially when the person engineering them has no idea what they’re talking about; that’s like watching a stage magician pay off seamless sleight of hand by pulling the lining out of their top hat. So, of course, the comments section on TikTok creator Darrell Rivera’s “Exploring Japan” video is alight with justifiable bafflement over the content. “To all the liberals that love Japan,” Rivera says in the clip, “just remember: it’s a conservative country.”
A wink and a zoom on Rivera’s face later, and the video ends—six seconds of stupefying false equivalence capped off by unearned smug satisfaction. A cursory check of Rivera’s feed reconciles his logic: He supports Sean Combs, Chris Brown, and President Donald Trump, and fills the hours between showcasing his tragically unoriginal hip-hop dance routines with braying over transgender people and “own the libs” segments, a’la “Exploring Japan.”
The trapdoor that right-wing people traipse across, without fail, on such occasions when they attempt to possess the socially progressive, is labeled “quiet please; class is in session.” Is Japan conservative? Sure. Does Japan’s “conservative” equate meaningfully, if at all, with the United States’ “conservative?” Not at all, and given that Rivera is American, it’s plain as day, even without mentioning the United States in the video, the comparison he means to establish: Liberals love Japan, but Japan is conservative. In your face, liberals!
Japan is “conservative” the same way that tomatoes are botanically classified as a fruit, but treated like a vegetable. It’s a technically correct distinction that’s muted by practical experience. It’s helpful to consider what “liberal” means in Japan’s political context, all the better to dispel American preconceptions regarding how nations other than our own define political philosophies. Japan’s left-leaning parties include the communist and anti-imperialist Chūkaku-ha, the Trotskyist Japan Revolutionary Communist League, and the country’s oldest political party, the Japanese Communist Party. Meanwhile, over on the conservative spectrum, we have—drumroll, please—the Liberal Democratic Party of Japan (LDP).
The immediate lesson here is, don’t get your political education from TikTok. The followup lesson is that on ideological grounds, Japan’s conservatism differs wildly from the United States’, where the party of small government is currently preoccupied with jamming through arguably one of the largest government reconciliation bills in modern American history, and where the party of big government’s response is incongruously small. If it is difficult to process the difference between Japan’s ideological terminology and the United States’, it’s important nonetheless to set aside our familiar binary. The LDP is the poster child for big tent parties, comprising a broad range of views represented by moderate liberals to fiscal conservatives to, yes, ultranationalists. And yet, the party operates through pragmatism, rather than through any one specific, easily identified political lens.
The immediate lesson here is, don’t get your political education from TikTok. The followup lesson is that on ideological grounds, Japan’s conservatism differs wildly from the United States’…
One of the LDP’s primary aims, and one of its oldest, is enhanced militarization, by way of amending Japan’s post-war constitution—which hasn’t been altered since its presentation in 1946 and implementation in 1947. The LDP would very much like for Article 9, which explicitly forbids Japan from maintaining any military forces, to include new language for clarifying the Self-Defense Forces, an organization that does what it says on the tin, but whose existence somewhat clangs against constitutionality. (Presently, they’re installing railguns on their warships.)
Here, the tension between an American interpretation of political ideology draws so tight, it practically snaps. The LDP wants to expand Japan’s military, which sounds pretty darn conservative to an American ear, but hasn’t succeeded in that goal on account of the party’s overarching respect for and deference to the constitution, which shouldn’t read as “liberal,” but nonetheless currently does, because the Republican administration regards the U.S. Constitution the way teenagers do their parents’ house rules. The closest the LDP has come to editing Japan’s constitution was 2024, and that push lost dramatic support after that year’s October elections.
None of this screams “conservative” in an American register. Tsuneyasu Takeda, a Japanese political critic, constitutional scholar, university professor, and, if you can believe it, a descendant of Emperor Meiji, explained why in an essay this year, in which he characterizes conservatism as “the willingness to adapt flexibly to protect what must be preserved.” (Meiji was the 122nd emperor of Japan, and ruled from 1867 until his death in 1912; he played a pivotal part in Japan’s industrial reform and thus in elevating the country to the world stage.)
This casts the 77 years of stubborn refusal to edit Japan’s constitution in a warm light, while also elucidating the thought process behind the country’s many liberal-identifying policies, including, but not limited to, a health insurance system that provides universal coverage, among the strictest gun control laws on the planet, robust environmental regulations coupled with likewise investment in renewable energy, and school lunches that are either subsidized into affordability or completely free. Areas lacking such progressive emphases tend to come along with time, like LGBTQ+ rights. If same-sex marriage isn’t yet legal, last year’s Supreme Court ruling that bans on same-sex marriage are unconstitutional signal that before long, it will be.
Fair’s fair: For all these merits, Sanseito, Japan’s emerging “Japanese first” party, reads very much like what is meant by “conservative” in the context of the United States. Sohei Kamiya, the group’s leader, spews the same xenophobia, antisemitism, isolationism, and general nonsense as every likeminded neo-fascist party that’s sprung up in all corners of the world—which is to say that he sounds like he slipped his straightjacket and somehow finagled a platform. But Sanseito’s existence doesn’t prove Rivera’s thesis (if a seconds long TikTok “gotcha” video can be construed as a thesis). It merely reinforces the divide between conservatism and neo-fascism, while continuing the latter’s spread in civil society. Sanseito does not prove that Japan is a conservative country. It merely proves that Japan, like all countries, is susceptible to the bleating hatred that comprises the agendas of every group like it—MAGA, Italy’s Fratelli d’Italia, France’s Rassemblement national, Australia’s Australia First Party, and on the list goes.
To avoid making the reverse conflation to Rivera’s, left-leaning Americans should note that these wonderfully left-leaning markers belie the struggle of Japan’s left-leaning parties to attract new voters; such is the reality of the country’s complex, nuanced political identity. Japan is neither liberal nor conservative. Rather, it’s practical, and in many ways forward-thinking on what feels like a molecular level. (If its reputation for innovation now isn’t what it was in the 1970s, it’s still miles ahead of the rest of the planet.) What it most certainly is not is American conservative—a land where guns outnumber people, almost 20 percent of all children suffer from hunger, and greenhouse gas emissions total to around five billion metric tons.
AloJapan.com