Varieties of Populism in Japan: Reiwa Shinsengumi, the Japan Restoration Party and the Ambiguities in Classifying Populism

Against a reductive ascription of Japan as "populism-free", this chapter analyzes two populist political parties by deploying a highly context-sensitive discourse-theoretical framework for the study of populism. It engages fruitfully with discursive ambiguities by analysing the usage of heuristic cues traditionally structuring the political field in Japan, such as liberal and conservative, to understand the positioning of populist contenders in a crowded opposition field. It argues that the two parties qualify as right-wing and leftwing populist parties, respectively. Importantly, the Japan Restoration Party must be understood as an outflanking of the main party of the right, the Liberal Democratic Party, in terms of neoliberal market ideology, while Reiwa Shinsengumi qualifies as an eclectic left-wing populist party, mixing emancipatory radical democratic politics with an openness to communitarian ideas of protecting the patria against neoliberal traitors. Opinion survey data is further used to qualify results of the discourse analysis.