Viewers became party members, and party members became organizers. Eventually, they became voters, too.

On May 16, the founder of Japan’s extremist right-wing Sanseitō party Sohei Kamiya was scheduled to speak at the University of Tokyo’s annual May Festival, an event mostly attended by freshmen. His planned appearance, organized by the conservative student group Ugo no Shū, was met with student protests, insistent calls to cancel the event, tweets expressing outrage, and an anonymous bomb threat.

A University of Tokyo student who spoke on the condition of anonymity due to fears of retaliation, told The Nation that Sanseitō’s polarizing rhetoric was a key reason behind the strong response. “I think [Kamiya] is kind of similar to Trump or maybe Hitler, and in fact, many people are saying that Kamiya is [using public speaking in the same way as] Hitler.”

Kamiya’s speech was eventually canceled, and by that afternoon, university organizers had called off the entire first day of May Festival programming. “Nobody thought that it was going to be canceled because some students were excited to have a debate with [Kamiya] on various political issues,” Taisei Katayama, a student whose law classroom was going to be used for the event, told The Nation. But the incident shaped up to be perhaps the most dramatic instance of backlash to date against Sanseitō, a right-wing populist party born in 2020 and explicitly inspired by President Trump.

Sanseitō, which literally means “political participation party,” has gained significant ground among Japanese youth. Whether its recent surge among young people will prove lasting remains uncertain, given vocal and, at times, heated opposition to the party. But experts say its rise reflects a broader political shift extending well beyond Japan: the growing appeal of right-wing populist movements around the world, including the coalitions that propelled President Trump to power in the United States.

“I think the younger generation has become less interested in politics because the same party has run this country for a long time,” they said. “People want a new party.” The Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), a broad-tent conservative party, has governed has Japan for nearly all of the seven decades since its founding in 1955.

In Japan’s upper-house election in July 2025, roughly a quarter of voters in their teens and 20s cast their ballots for Sanseitō, according to a national exit poll. Among voters in their 30s, the party polled around 23 percent in the same exit poll, more than any other party. For comparison, the LDP polled around 12 percent among voters in their teens and 20s and 13 percent among those in their 30s.

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“The interesting thing here is that young people make up Sanseitō’s core base,” Chris Burgess, a professor of Japanese studies at Tsuda University, Tokyo, told The Nation. “If you look at the right-wing parties in Britain and the Brexit vote, for example, the main supporters were older people—but in Japan, it’s the opposite.”

Part of the reason behind the party’s powerful young base might lie in where Sanseitō started to do its politics: online.

When Kamiya first founded the party in 2020, Sanseitō occupied a small niche. But a series of YouTube videos made by Kamiya and two former party affiliates in which they questioned the Covid-19 vaccine, was all the party needed to gain an online following.

Traditional Japanese parties have garnered support from the top down through local politicians and coalition groups, Yasuo Takao, an adjunct senior research fellow in political science at Curtin University, told The Nation. But Sanseitō “reversed this process,” he said. “It first attracted young audiences through YouTube and social media, then converted viewers into participants in study meetings, street campaigns, fundraising, party branches, and candidate recruitment.”

Following the pandemic, young people who first encountered Sanseitō through one of its three YouTube channels and numerous social-media accounts could pay membership fees to support the party, join one of its 287 local party branches across the country, or even become candidates themselves. In summer of 2020, Kamiya established the Sanseitō “DIY school,” which was branded as both an in-person and online program intended to teach prospective candidates about campaign strategy, communications training, and legal information for potential candidates.

Burgess said that the upper house election in July 2025 was the “turning point” for the party: Sanseitō gained 14 seats in the 248-member House of Councillors in addition to its one existing seat. “Suddenly, Sanseitō sort of bursts into the scene and has an amazing number of seats,” Burgess said. This February, the party seemed to sustain its popularity as it won 15 seats in a snap election for the lower house. There are now 190 elected officials across Japan who are affiliated with Sanseitō, according to its website.

Beyond condemning vaccines, Sanseitō’s platform has expanded to encompass a broad range of political issues. Most salient is its staunch opposition to immigration, encapsulated in the party’s “Japanese First” slogan. Its rhetoric casts suspicion on foreigners broadly, often blurring distinctions between immigrants, foreign residents, tourists, and undocumented migrants. The party is also strongly pro-natalist, stands against same-sex marriage, and has criticized the LGBTQ+ community.

Kotaro Sumi, a graduate student at the University of Tokyo, told The Nation that provocative, inflammatory videos produced by the party are frequently recommended to him via online algorithms. “It is quite common to encounter Sanseitō-related content on social-media platforms like X and YouTube, especially through short clips of speeches,” Sumi said.

Ugo no Shū, the conservative student group that invited Kamiya to speak at the University of Tokyo, has similarly seen a surge in engagement online. While their group is composed of around 20 University of Tokyo students, Ugo no Shū boasts over 50,000 followers on X and makes frequent appearances on various video channels. “We are really gaining popularity on the Internet,” Tai Yamada, the leader of the student group said.

Across Europe and the US, Takao explained that right-wing populist movements have built support by drawing a moral divide between ordinary citizens and an unresponsive political establishment, exploiting a growing distrust of experts and mainstream media and tying economic insecurity to fears of cultural decline. “[Sanseitō] has converted otherwise separate concerns—vaccination, food safety, inflation, taxation, immigration, globalization and cultural change—into a common narrative that ordinary Japanese are being neglected by political elites and foreign-oriented interests,” Takao noted.

Sanseitō politicians have openly expressed admiration for right-wing populist movements abroad, including Germany’s Alternative for Germany (AfD) and President Trump’s Republican Party. “Sanseitō is studying how those right-wing, populist parties have become successful,” Testuro Kobayashi, a political science and economics professor at Waseda University, said. “They study [parties] quite well, and they try to import those strategies and tactics,” he added, nodding to the targeted use of alternative, non-legacy media platforms for outreach.

Increasingly, Sanseitō has built relationships with the populist right groups it has been watching from afar. Last week, party leader and member of the House of Councillors Kamiya met with AfD leader Tino Chrupalla in Germany and introduced Sanseitō to a group of 20 AfD parliament members.

In September 2025, Charlie Kirk’s appearance in Tokyo at a Sanseitō-organized event rallied over 1,200 people; the party also established a branch last year dedicated to courting allies prominent in American right-wing circles such as Steve Bannon and Tucker Carlson.

Yamada, who is pro-Trump, is also eyeing opportunities to expand Ugo no Shū’s reach beyond Japan. “Specifically, what we want to do is to collaborate with foreign universities; we are looking forward to communicating with [colleges] in Germany or the US,” he said.

Katayama described Kamiya’s public speaking engagements as similar to Charlie Kirk’s campus events: “Kamiya talks to people in person,” he said, describing a grassroots approach that prioritizes public, on-the-ground interactions with voters.

But Sanseitō’s support among young people may already be waning, experts observe. Some of the young voters who propelled the party into the national spotlight have gravitated back toward the more mainstream LDP under Sanae Takaichi, Japan’s first female prime minister.

“Many anti-establishment people thought, ‘OK, Takaichi can do what we want her to do, so we don’t actually need Sanseitō,’” Kobayashi said. This backtracking occurs at the same time that LDP has moved rightward on issues such as immigration and foreign policy—matters Sanseitō helped push to the center of the political debate.

University of Tokyo student Sota Yokota, who does not affiliate with any party, added that he thinks “there’s little they can do, even if they gain political power.” Currently, the long-standing LDP holds a two-thirds supermajority in the lower house, while Sanseitō controls just over a dozen seats in each chamber of the national legislature.

This leaves the party with limited power to enact its agenda on its own. Popularity for the party has also waned since last year: a national poll conducted in July found support for Sanseitō at 2.5 percent, compared to a peak of 7.6 percent.

“I don’t really think that Sanseitō will become even more popular in the future, and I feel like I see them less often in the news,” Yokota said.

Other groups like the Democratic Youth League of Japan, a left-wing group, have seen an increase in membership over the past year. “We’ve seen a significant increase in young people joining us,” Ayumi Nakayama, a chairperson for the party said.

“It’s not like the people who voted for Sanseitō were all far-right,” Nakayama explained, pointing to economic anxieties and grievances acutely experienced by Japan’s young people in the past year. “Compared to the time of the July election, the public as a whole has become much more level-headed—I think it’s not as much of a trend anymore.”