A trembling voice leaks from a white flip phone: “My father passed away and didn’t pay the NHK bill. What should I do?” The politician, Tachibana Takashi, advises the caller to ignore any requests from the national broadcaster’s notoriously strict bill collectors. After handling the call, Mr. Tachibana made a video for his YouTube channel praising the broadcaster. He concluded, as usual, by raising his fist and chanting his party’s slogan: “NHK wo bukkowasu! (Destroy NHK!)”
His party, once known as the “Party to Protect the People from NHK” (now simply the “NHK Party”), is one of the strangest agendas to enter national politics in recent years. Mr Tachibana, who founded the party in 2013, was elected to Japan’s upper house in 2019. Two other oddball campaigners repeated the feat in July. One is Higashitani Yoshikazu, better known as “Gasya”, a YouTuber and celebrity gossiper. The other is Kamiya Sohei, whose right-wing Sansei-to party is anti-vax, anti-immigration and a staunch advocate of organic vegetables.
Public television bashing may be a symbol of Japanese populism. “I’ve always hated NHK,” says Kubota Manabu, a supporter of the NHK party who helps people trying to dodge the broadcaster’s bills. The country is lucky to have such footballing rabble-rousers. Yet their emergence is not improving the national conversation of the country. During a recent televised debate in which leaders of several political parties discussed important economic and security issues, Kurokawa Atsuhiko, the NHK party representative, sang the song. Ishiwata Tomohiro, a journalist covering the NHK party, describes Mr. Tachibana’s movement as a bunch of headline-grabbing opportunists. “All they want to do is build their own little empire.”
Japan has a history of such fringe groups. The New Party for Salary Men and the Sanskari Happiness Realization Party are among the many that have included it in the diet before dousing the fire. Yet even if his success is fleeting, it is a warning to the country’s mainstream parties.
It’s an indictment of how remote, opaque and mind-painfully dull they are. Legislators often take naps during long speeches in the Diet. This sets a low bar for the rebels. “Being popular requires being a little less boring,” says Axel Klein, a political scientist at the University of Duisburg-Essen.
The contrast is particularly striking on the campaign trail. The strategy of mainstream politicians, which tend to be old and grey, has hardly changed over the decades. They usually go around distributing pamphlets in a car with a loud speaker. Fringe parties make better use of social media. Amazingly, the NHK party has four times as many subscribers on YouTube as the Liberal Democratic Party, which has governed Japan almost uninterrupted since 1955.
This points to a more worrying trend. Japanese voters are deeply disappointed. Turnout in recent national elections has been around 50%. And the young voters that the smaller parties attract have been the most disillusioned. The LDP’s share of voters aged 18-29 fell from 46% in 2017 to 32% in this year’s election to the upper house. Until mainstream parties can reverse that trend, circus acts like the NHK party may be less entertainment than more serious populism.
© 2023, The Economist Newspaper Limited. All rights reserved. From The Economist, published under license. Original content can be found at www.economist.com
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