【by Satofumi Kawamura, June 2026】
The emergence of “Takaichi’s Japan” poses a problem that exceeds the established vocabulary of contemporary political analysis. Since assuming office, Takaichi Sanae has frequently been described as embodying the resurgence of Japanese conservatism. Her administration combines constitutional revisionism, an assertive security policy, historical revisionism, economic nationalism, and increasingly exclusionary rhetoric toward China, immigration, and national identity. From the perspective of comparative politics, these developments appear readily intelligible through familiar categories such as populism, the New Right, illiberal democracy, or authoritarian nationalism.
Yet such descriptions identify the ideological characteristics of Takaichi’s administration more readily than they explain its political appeal. Why has a discourse centered on imperial history, geopolitical confrontation, and national identity acquired such affective and/or emotional force? Existing analyses typically seek answers in institutional change, electoral realignment, or geopolitical insecurity. While these approaches illuminate important aspects of contemporary Japan, they are less able to explain how particular visions of the nation become politically compelling. What requires explanation is not only the content of the contemporary Japanese New Right, but the processes through which political imaginaries become historically effective.
This special topic approaches Takaichi’s Japan from a different perspective. Rather than treating empire, democracy, and the New Right as separate objects of analysis, the essays collected here explore how they become articulated through the production of political imagination. Taken together, they argue that the contemporary Japanese New Right derives its force not merely from exclusionary rhetoric or historical revisionism, but from its capacity to organize political expectations in ways that conventional political vocabularies struggle to capture.
If political imagination has become a central terrain of political struggle, it is because politics is never confined to the management of the present. Every political project also seeks to organize the future by making particular visions of social life appear desirable, credible, and achievable. The question is therefore not simply who governs, but who succeeds in producing politically compelling futures.
Recent critical theory has increasingly emphasized this future-oriented dimension of politics. Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams (2015), for example, argue in Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work that neoliberalism’s enduring strength lies not merely in its institutional dominance but in its capacity to monopolize the political imagination of the future, while the contemporary Left has largely abandoned the task of constructing alternative futures. Their intervention suggests a broader understanding of politics in which futures are not simply anticipated but actively produced through collective expectations and political practice.
This understanding resonates with the notion of hyperstition: the idea that imagined futures acquire material force precisely by organizing action in the present.[1] Political projects do not merely respond to reality; they participate in producing it by rendering particular futures believable. From this perspective, the central question posed by Takaichi’s Japan is not simply what future it advocates, but how a particular vision of Japan becomes imaginable, believable, and politically effective.
Contemporary Japanese conservatism, particularly under Takaichi, is unmistakably hyperstitional. Its political imagination is not confined to recovering the past but projects an ambitious vision of Japan as a technologically advanced nation, combining artificial intelligence, cyber security, space exploration, digital governance, and military innovation into a renewed national future. Rather than merely defending an inherited order, it seeks to construct a future that appears both desirable and attainable.
Yet the Japanese case also suggests that hyperstition alone is insufficient to explain the political imagination of the contemporary New Right. The futures projected by Takaichi’s Japan are not constructed ex nihilo. Rather, they are articulated through an imperial repertoire of images, narratives, and symbols that selectively reconfigure Japan’s imperial past. What is mobilized is therefore not empire as historical memory, but an imperial imaginary that provides normative resources for imagining the future. The future is rendered politically meaningful not despite the past but through its continual reconstruction.
The political imagination of Takaichi’s Japan therefore emerges through the articulation of technological futurity and imperial repertoire. It is precisely this articulation that distinguishes the contemporary Japanese New Right from conventional accounts of conservatism or nationalism. The political imagination of Takaichi’s Japan is therefore neither simply futuristic nor nostalgic. It is produced through the articulation of technological futurity and an imperial repertoire, making the future appear credible precisely by anchoring it in an imagined national/imperial past.
The temporal logic of Takaichi’s Japan can be further clarified through Brian Massumi’s (2015) concept of preemption. For Massumi, contemporary power increasingly operates through anticipated futures rather than accomplished facts. Political intervention is justified not by what has happened, but by what could happen. Future threats become politically effective precisely because they organize action in the present. In contemporary Japan, such preemptive logics are readily visible in the anticipation of geopolitical conflict, cyber insecurity, demographic decline, and the perceived erosion of national sovereignty.
Yet Takaichi’s political imagination cannot be understood through preemption alone. Alongside the anticipation of future threats runs an equally important politics of redemption. The appeal to imperial history, national pride, and constitutional revision is not simply nostalgic. Rather, it constructs an image of a Japan that ought to be recovered—a normative vision of the nation that legitimizes present political action. If preemption governs through imagined futures, redemption governs through imagined pasts.
These temporal orientations are not contradictory but mutually constitutive. The technological futures projected by Takaichi’s government acquire political legitimacy through an imperial repertoire. Meanwhile, calls to restore Japan’s national pride and constitutional order gain political urgency through narratives of impending geopolitical crisis. Hyperstitional future-making, preemptive security, and redemptive nationalism therefore operate not as separate political logics but as articulated temporalities that together constitute the political imagination of the contemporary Japanese New Right.
From this perspective, the problem posed by Takaichi’s Japan is not simply ideological but temporal. Its political force lies in its capacity to articulate multiple temporal horizons—anticipated futures, reconstructed pasts, and present anxieties—into a coherent political project. It is this temporal articulation that the contributions to this special topic seek to illuminate.
The essays collected in this special topic approach Takaichi’s Japan from complementary perspectives while sharing a common concern with the political imagination of the contemporary Japanese New Right. The first article, Sana Sakihama’s “Okinawan Net-Uyo and the Politics of Affect: A Comparison with Mainland Japanese Net-Uyo,” examines the affective dynamics of online nationalism in Okinawa. The second article, Takefumi Ukai’s “The Distorted Circulation of Political Discourse: Colonial Suffrage in Taiwan and Postwar Electoral Reform in Japan,” reconsiders the historical articulation of empire and democracy through the question of colonial suffrage. The third article, Andreas Eder-Ramsauer’s “Retrotopian Affect and the Takaichi Phenomenon: Prefigurative Nostalgia under ‘General Conservatism,’” analyses Takaichi Sanae’s political project as an articulation of technological futurity, imperial repertoire, and national restoration. Rather than treating these as separate objects of inquiry, the essays collectively demonstrate how empire, democracy, and the New Right are articulated through the production of political imagination in contemporary Japan. In doing so, this special topic seeks to contribute not only to debates on Japanese politics but also to broader discussions in critical theory concerning the temporalities, imaginaries, and affective conditions through which contemporary political projects become imaginable, legitimate, and politically effective.
AUTHOR
Satofumi Kawamura is Associate Professor in the Department of Communication and Culture, Faculty of Humanities, Otsuma Women’s University, Japan. His research focuses on critical theory, cultural and media theory, and Japanese media culture. He is the author of Jōdō, Media, Seiji: Fukakujitsusei no Jidai no Karuchuraru Sutadīzu (Affect, Media, and Politics: Cultural Studies in an Age of Uncertainty, Shunjusha, 2024). His recent English publications include “Love Live! as an Affective-Religious Medium in the Postsecular Era” in Idology in Transcultural Perspective: Anthropological Investigations of Popular Idolatry (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021) and “The Politics of Maritime Imaginary in Modern Japan” in Entangled Waterscapes in Asia (Brill, 2025). His work examines the intersections of affect, media, technology, political imagination, and critical theory in contemporary Japan.
NOTE
[1] See: https://www.orphandriftarchive.com/articles/hyperstition/.
REFERENCES
Massumi, Brian. 2015. Ontopower: War, Powers, and the State of Perception. Durham: Duke University Press.
Srnicek, Nick, and Alex Williams. 2015. Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work. London: Verso.