Note: This article was written between August-September 2025, when there was a lot of buzz about media and insurgent populism in Japan. Unfortunately, it wasn’t accepted for publication, so I’m going to stick it here (it probably needs more editing so my apologies in advance for anything unclear).
9月2025年にアメリカのネット雑誌に持ち込んだ記事。日本のメディア環境の変化、特に「ニューメディア」vs「オールドメディア」という神話的対立構造を細かく説明しようしとたあまり、編集者にあまりに学者っぽすぎると言われ、ボツに……。 残念ではあるけれど、一つの記録としてここに残しておく。
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Japanese media, long characterized by relatively impartial newspapers and a tightly regulated TV industry, is facing a slow-moving crisis. The country’s Upper House elections in July were only the most recent manifestation. As the long-ruling center right Liberal Democratic Party-Komeitō coalition suffered ongoing fallout from yet another corruption scandal, two relative newcomers capitalized on voter discontent and surged at the ballot box: the centrist Democratic Party for the People (founded in 2018), popular for its calls to lower taxes, and the far-right populist party Sanseito (2020). The youth and previously apathetic working-age voters rocked the vote, but in ways inscrutable to political and media elites increasingly disconnected from an atomized electorate. These voters tune into an online world of YouTube debaters and Tik Tok and Instagram influencers who make a living entertaining and mobilizing the alienated and previously apathetic—the world of “new media” (nyu media).
If you’re in Japan, or follow Japanese media much, you will certainly hear this term, and its unfortunate counterpart, “old media” (orudo media), thrown around frequently and sometimes sensationally to describe increasing media polarization in the country. These terms are, upon initial inspection, rather predictable. New media means the “democratized” digital media platforms of warring American and Chinese tech giants—media free of fact-checkers and entanglements with the LDP and bureaucracy. Old media is, by contrast, the stodgy world of the national newspaper-Tokyo television station keiretsu (conglomerates rooted in share crossholding) and the highly neutral, semi-public broadcaster NHK.
It is rather alarming upon closer observation, however, that all major print newspapers, public and private major broadcasters alike, can be, and so often are, conceptually subsumed into a single category despite their apparent ideological differences. This reflects the widespread belief they are in fact the same entity, an entity that was decisive in creating and stabilizing reality, and whose grip on said reality is now loosening. Of course, there are parallels here with the decline of “legacy media” in the US today, but the differences are instructive. Whereas media fragmentation in the US largely precedes social media, the result of broadcast deregulation in the 1980s, subsequent cable news polarization and deep educational and class divides in media consumption, Japan’s media establishment remains more regulated, homogenous, and trusted by the general public.
In Japan, it is primarily age, rather than ideology, class or education, that determines media fragmentation: The under-40 crowd increasingly turns to social media and aggregators for news, while the over-50 crowd continues to rely on the far less polarized world of TV and newspapers. This information divide also explains the utopian flavor to the term “new media” —that it somehow harmonizes with and expresses the dreams of the structurally overwhelmed youth, for better or worse. In turn, the established parties, LDP and opposition alike, find themselves grouped together and portrayed as sinking alongside old media.
Since the July elections, the political situation has further fragmented: With the election of the conservative firebrand Sanae Takaichi to the LDP president position, the Komeito party left its longtime coalition government with the LDP. Takaichi was subsequently chosen as the first female prime minister on October 21st, and has seen approval ratings as high as 75 percent. The youth and conservative voters previously disaffected with the direction of the LDP appear to have returned, and pundits triumphantly declare the re-absorption of the populist media energy that shocked the establishment just a few months ago. Such a view, however, overlooks key facts: support for the LDP itself remains low, and Takaichi faces an uphill battle in the Diet as her party is now a minority government in both Houses. In short, there is a very large margin for error, and, by extension, the return of the battle between old and new media.
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So, when did old media become… old? I asked media scholar Masaaki Ito about this distinction between old and new media, and he described last year as an inflection point. This checks out with my experience. I was busy finishing my dissertation in Tokyo at the time but can recall the media panicking about a wave of unexpected, perhaps social media-influenced, election results: outsider Shinji Ishimaru’s strong showing in the Tokyo gubernatorial election (he came in second, losing to incumbent Yuriko Koike); then, the above-mentioned Democratic Party for the People’s surge in the October general election; and, finally, the spectacular re-election of disgraced Hyogo Prefecture mayor Motohiko Saito, aided by an online campaign of misinformation. These all felt like flash-in-the-pan events assembled frantically by the newspapers and television into a meaningful narrative of Japan fully reaching “SNS” (social media) politics, that miserable global standard. In retrospect, what seems more important is that by incessantly covering these events and imbuing them with meaning, representatives of established media (newspaper journalists, television hosts, etc.) came to see and refer to themselves as “old media,” and the term took root.
New media, by turn, has a longer history. It was first used, per Ito, in the 1980s and reflected technological-determinist hype that the growth of (pre-internet) telecommunications—satellite broadcast, fax machines, personal computers, teletext, etc.—would fundamentally reconfigure the highly centralized world of post-1960s Japanese mass media. These origins, however, have largely been forgotten as the promised information revolution didn’t come to pass. While largely a product of the imagination of advertisers and engineers at the time, it is worth noting that “new media” was originally utopian, as it seems to have become so again today.
If the term “old media” is of more recent vintage than its counterpart, the sentiment behind it is not. There is a long history of dissatisfaction with the media rooted particularly in the perception that its ostensible neutrality was a function of proximity to the LDP. Ruling continuously from its formation in 1955 until 1993, the LDP proved as adept as an octopus at strategically absorbing opposition policies and ruthlessly extending its base. The national newspapers Yomiuri, Asahi, Mainichi, Sankei, and Nikkei managed to gain privileged access to this party and the bureaucracy it fused with, and their reporters closely covered—at times even directly participated in—the LDP factional infighting that defined Japanese politics. Despite growing ideological polarization of editorial positions in the wake of the Cold War and 1990s electoral reform that encouraged the growth of a contending opposition party, their fierce competition with one another means that they remain relatively impartial to avoid alienating prospective readers (national newspapers, for instance, do not formally endorse politicians or parties at election time). Significantly, these papers have struggled to pivot from a household delivery to digital subscription model and consequently seen steep declines in their circulations: Yomiuri is currently down to roughly 5.5 million from 10 million in 2010, Asahi to 3.3 million from 8 million in the mid-2000s.
NHK, in turn, is characterized by a highly objective style of news coverage and historical emphasis on the bureaucracy. It played an important role in legitimating the postwar administrative state—you, citizen, can believe in your competent rulers. Commercial television news generally followed this precedent, despite experiments in the 1990s with more opinionated, American-style pundits. Central to the neutrality of both public and private broadcast media is the strict Broadcast Law (originally based on the FCC’s “Fairness Doctrine” in the US). The LDP was able to leverage its control over the Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications, which issued broadcast permits, to explicitly or implicitly threaten television stations when they produced “biased” programming that the LDP claimed violated the Broadcast Law; it also pressured the NHK through appointing sympathetic members to its board and threatening to hold requests for budget increases hostage (these must be passed in the Diet).
While the situation has changed today with the weakening of the LDP, “old media” remains collectively a neutral and concerned guardian of liberal democracy in ways that might seem desirable to Americans inside of the degraded circus of the contemporary US news cycle. The frequent absence of candid opinion and political critique, however, is its perennial weakness—reflecting a long history of informal control by the LDP.
In the context of larger Japanese society, the ubiquity of the term “new media” today clearly mirrors the political instability and discontent that has followed the long second Shinzo Abe administration (2012-2020). Abe, assassinated in July 2022, was widely popular, not so much for his rightwing agenda—which only resonated with a loyal, strident minority of historical revisionists and pundits—, but for his ambitious economic policies. Coupling aggressive quantitative easing by the Bank of Japan with deregulation to stimulate investment, “Abenomics” promised to break through years of deflation and deliver growth. It produced some positive results, including a lower unemployment rate, but ultimately failed to counteract Japan Inc.’s long ingrained tendency towards cash hoarding and wage suppression. The period also saw multiple sales tax hikes and the lowering of the corporate tax rate, a regressive pairing which hurt household consumption.
To characterize the experience of the 2010s for many—despite a brief resurgence of liberal activism in 2015 in opposition to controversial security legislation—we might invoke the title of sociologist Noritoshi Furuichi’s bestselling book, Happy Youth in a Hopeless Country. This text opens with then-New York Times Tokyo bureau chief Martin Fackler asking Furuichi why Japanese youth don’t revolt against the country’s stagnation and growing inequality, to which he replies, “Because they are happy.” In the wake of the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and Fukushima nuclear accident, public surveys showed people increasingly satisfied with their daily life, despite stagnation—turning inwards, away from democracy and politics, towards hobbies, towards your friends, the small things in life. Voter turnout fell. Abe waged a war on the “old media” that drew international criticism, but many didn’t notice or care.
That post-historical moment, however, is quickly receding. In 2025, the Japanese establishment is struggling to adjust to cost-push inflation that eats into real wages (a very different place than the goal of Abenomics to rekindle inflation through robust wage growth); rice shortages; weak yen caused by quantitative-easing devaluation and (until recently) rising US interest rates; and fierce manufacturing competition from China. Reports of badly-behaved tourists abound. The youth and working-age adults are apparently no longer happy, and the best place to perceive the structure of their unhappiness is inside of “new media.”
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Returning to where we started, Democratic Party for the People (DPFP) and Sanseito were the clear winners of the July Upper House elections. They receive overwhelming support from the youth, that previously rather untapped demographic, and use social media in an organic way that established parties have struggled to adapt to.
DPFP, led by Yuichiro Tamaki, is a splinter group from the Democratic Party, the previous leading opposition party. Its main support base is the conservative faction of the powerful Rengo union, making it the direct inheritor of the premier anti-communist party of the postwar: the Democratic Socialist Party. As such, it is not a place that one would expect the youth to congregate. They come for the party’s emphasis on decreasing the tax burden for working-age adults and promises to invest heavily in education through bond issuance. The implicit populist messaging is clear: The current tax and pension system is rigged against the youth and working age adults—give them a chance! What is ignored in this equation is questions of redistribution and inequality that transcend the generational divide: Despite representations of the pension class siphoning away the youth’s hard-earned cash, there remain massive disparities in said class and many live in poverty. The DPFP supporters are primarily part of the new middle class—students or well-educated professionals—who stand to gain from wage growth inside of secure regular employment or sought after creative or tech positions. They are acutely aware of Japanese stagnation, for which they blame established parties.
The word reisho succinctly describes the media world that many in this demographic tune into. Reisho, translated as cynicism (literally: sneering laughter), is virulent antipathy towards any kind of ideological commitment, left or right. The message is clear: check your ideology at the door and cooly join the policy debate using facts and data alone. The king of this brand is the founder of the influential image board 2channel and owner of controversial 4chan, Hiroyuki Nishimura (who goes by just his first name), and his performative brand of argumentation, ronpa. Hiroyuki’s appeal lies in his ability to catch his interlocutor off-guard by asking sudden yes or no questions (“your explanation is too long, is your answer yes, or no?”), or deploying cherry-picked fragments of data to frame others as inept or ideologically motivated. It is all about reaction speed. Ronpa, inspired by Hiroyuki’s fetishizing of programming and hacking over abstract “humanities”-based approaches to problem solving, is a call to arms for logical, technocratic competence to overcome the incompetent traditional parties, groups supposedly cowed by ideology and their reliance on the massive voting bloc of the older generation ( “silver democracy”).
Another central figure in reisho is the Yale economist Yusuke Narita (known for his trademark eyeglasses, one circular, one square), who drew international condemnation in 2023 for his sardonic comments that the Japanese elderly should commit mass suicide to save the country. Narita took part in the philosopher Kojin Karatani’s anarchist collective NAM in middle school, before going on to obtain a PhD in economics from MIT, and pen several bestselling books. These include the 2022 Democracy in the 22nd Century, which explores using algorithms to cybernetically modify and improve stagnant Japanese democracy. For all his thought experiments, however, it is Narita’s frank and hopeless diagnoses of establishment Japanese politics and media that appeal to so many, or as he states in the opening of the above book, “I can’t bring myself to care about politics, politicians, elections. They don’t matter, that’s how I feel. The sight of so many old men (ossan)wearing tacky suits, swarming like pikmin.”
Hiroyuki and Narita’s disdain for established parties and emphasis on technocratic logic over ideology could be likened to a form of radical centrism that I have heard political scientists call “valence populism.” This ethos harmonizes with Democratic Party for the People’s sophisticated social media campaigns and rhetoric (the party slogan is “solutions over confrontation”); the above-mentioned 2024 Tokyo gubernatorial candidate Shinji Ishimaru’s slick entrepreneurial appeal; or the popular programmer-turned-politician Takahiro Ano, whose party “Team Future” promises to use AI-fueled “broad listening” to tap into public opinion and move beyond agonistic politics. It also highlights the collapse of the ideologies that supported postwar Japanese politics. These were framed less around competing economic visions than the centrality of diplomacy and particularly Japan’s relationship with the US (center-right conservatives led by the LDP supported the US-Japan ANPO security treaty and constitutional revision to formally recognize the Japan Self-Defense Force, whereas the Japan Socialist Party and progressive left called for the abolishment of the security treaty and the Japan Self-Defense Force). Politics based on this classical ideological orientation feels unreal to many, and reisho embodies this unreality.
The media home for reisho is the world of YouTube entertainment debate programs and news sites, which evolved in part out of the freewheeling culture of Japanese streaming platform Niconico in the 2010s. Chief among them are Abema Prime (which is funded partially by TV Asahi); ex-TV Tokyo producer Hiroki Takahashi’s chaotic program ReHacQ; the business channel PIVOT, and the news site and net salon, NewsPicks. These form a collective circuit for popular politicians like Yuichiro Tamaki to appear and appeal to the young and relatively elite, often circulating in social media afterwards as short, sub-titled clips. One tunes in here to see politicians mix with the heroes of the reisho crowd: Hiroyuki, Yusuke Narita, Shinji Ishimaru, Ranmaru Kishitani and a host of other influencer-debaters who performatively battle the entrenched, incompetent establishment. They implicitly frame both the left, for its idealism, or the right, for its vulgarity, as out of touch and hopeless.
For an American audience, this media culture could be likened to a fusion of the “Manosphere” comedy podcast circuit’s emphasis on “casual” and “real” discussion, with the enlightened centrism of ex-Vox pundits such as Matthew Yglesias or Ezra Klein—though this latter group also makes a living eating into the political establishment whereas the reisho crowd does not. They are more thorough cynics, floating aloofly and playfully over their audience of non-believers.
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Next, we have the second winner of the July elections: the far-right Sanseito, which grew from 1 to 15 seats. Sanseito is the postmodern, TikTok and Instagram-fueled nativist berserk. A fair amount has already been written about them, most importantly analysis by political scientists Robert Fahey and Romeo Marcantuoni, so I will only discuss the basics here. The party was founded in 2020 by the charismatic Sohei Kamiya, who apparently was inspired to become involved in politics while backpacking in Asia and meeting youth who cared about their “homelands,” unlike apathetic Japanese youth. It was forged in YouTube, with historian Mitsuru Kurayama and influencer “Kazuya” helping Kamiya set up a channel called “Channel Grand Strategy” in 2013, an opportunistic attempt to join the burgeoning world of the online Japanese right in the early 2010s. The structure of the party, in turn, parallels the Japanese Communist Party and Komeito as it is funded primarily through member dues and merchandise sales rather than government subsidies. The party’s highly mobilized base and well-organized presence in local governments sets it apart from other populist parties who primarily rely on media exposure to attract votes.
Sanseito grew rapidly during the pandemic, mobilizing anti-vaccine rhetoric and visions of globalist cabals that will be familiar to American readers. It parrots MAGA—its slogan is, after all, “Japanese first” — and mobilizes vague feelings of rage and alienation against a constantly moving set of targets and causes (immigrants, communists, the bureaucracy, globalism, etc.).
This amorphous nature is reflected in the diversity of media subcultures that support it. If the above-mentioned reisho crowd is found in popular debate programs and as such relatively easy to visualize, Sanseito shills and grifters are far more dispersed between fragmented TikTok, YouTube and Instagram influencer accounts, circulating in more unpredictable, chaotic ways. Such diversity underscores the difficulty of ascertaining who exactly its supporters are (a mixture of disgruntled LDP voters who left the party post-Abe, organic food and new age fans, vaccine conspiracists and downwardly mobile, previously apathetic middle-class voters).
Aside from the official posts of the party, one finds, for instance, popular and healthy Instagram specimens like Elizabeth and Keigo Takasaki, each with hundreds of thousands of followers, cheerfully reminding viewers to awake from their happy slumbers and vote because Japan is about to being colonized by immigrants. One finds a surgically castrated 21-year-old named Yuki Ishii who gained overnight fame hijacking the popular investment program Reiwa no Tora (participants pitch business ideas to a group of entrepreneurs who decide whether to give them money). He had no “idea” to pitch, using his time on the program instead to defend Sanseito and lambast its hosts for their political apathy, for accepting Japan’s subservient, client state status to the US. One also finds suspicious economic analysts like Takaaki Mitsuhashi who preach the gospel of Modern Monetary Theory (Japan can debt-finance to the moon because it has a sovereign currency, and its bonds are majority held domestically). His position harmonizes with others who promote a popular conspiracy theory that the root of Japanese decline is the Ministry of Finance, defender of the balanced budget. They call and protest for the destruction of this ministry. Sanseito is effectively a sluice for all kinds of dissatisfaction with Japanese society, carefully channeled into a constantly shifting, unfeasible program.
If the DPFP-reisho crowd’s enemy is the self-satisfied and inept gerontocracy holding Japan back from innovation, Sanseito battles the globalist Japanese “elite,” which it claims imports immigrant workers to suppress native wages while fire-saleing Japanese assets to US and Chinese capital. If the Japanese elite is, for reisho, incompetent, it is for Sanseito decidedly sinister. Perhaps in this they represent a clear repudiation of the postwar center-right order, based on LDP hegemony and overly close relations with the US, though it is unclear that many of its supporters know exactly what that postwar order was or is.
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The conspiratorial and infectious nature of Sanseito is very troubling, particularly as it successfully entered “old media” as well in the last election, appearing in television debates and receiving extensive newspaper coverage. Countering it will be difficult. Today progressive and leftist contingents are largely absent from the world of new media. There are of course liberal media channels and platforms, such as journalist Daisuke Tsuda’s Politas TV, and independent outlets Ark Times and Democracy Times, but their presence is dwarfed by the ironists and nativists. It is hard, as always, to get traction, but I hope that the left in Japan can find a way to join the battle for hearts and minds.
For the time being, the Democratic Party for the People and Sanseito are at the vanguard of “new media.” Of course, this binary between “old media” and “new media” is a simplistic one—all sorts of hybrid forms exist. Sociologist César Castellvi argues, for instance, that the national newspapers, despite rapidly declining circulations, continue to remain a central part of the media ecosystem through the popularity of news aggregators such as Yahoo News, which circulate the newspapers’ articles to a wide audience. The simplistic nature of the binary, though, is its strength. It is a story with undeniable appeal. There is an increasingly widespread and troubling association of the “old media” with the “old” established parties that both need to resist. The term “new media” is clearly a projection, a utopia—perhaps a pipe dream—in contemporary Japan, but it will persist precisely because of this.
As a sign of the changing times, the above-mentioned online hero Hiroyuki was invited to host a widely viewed live online debate between candidates leading up to the LDP presidential election in late September. He sat relaxed in a sports hoodie (in stark contrast to the candidates in their stiff suits), and partway through unexpectedly asked the candidates to describe their goals for Japan in English. It was vaguely embarrassing and entertaining to watch these powerful politicians subject themselves to such treatment to appeal to a younger audience. Sanae Takaichi’s message in English was just one phrase: “Japan is back.” Back to what, though, is less than clear.