【by Andreas Eder-Ramsauer, June 2026】
Takaichi Sanae achieved an astounding electoral victory in 2026. Although her initial high support rates are becoming unstable now,[1] fanfare around her victory allows crucial insights into the post-2012 conjuncture of Japanese politics. So far, commentary on the nature and expected stability for the Takaichi government repeatedly discussed her position as first female Prime Minister and an irrational “idol worship” (gūzōsūhai) centered on her by a suffering populace (Kamikubo 2026: 134-137). Although these readings are insightful, they leave undiscussed deeper desires and structural shifts that illuminate her position within Japanese society.
In the post-2012 conjuncture, which is characterized by the aftermath of the 3/11 triple disaster and the collapse of the Democratic Party of Japan, many commentators have discussed an “overall shift toward conservatism” (sōhoshu-ka) (see the journal Chihei, 2024, issue 6)[2] or an “inflation of conservatism” (hoshu no infure jōtai) in contemporary Japanese politics (Nakajima, Ishiba 2024: 26). The fact that Takaichi Sanae relies on nostalgia and conservative traditionalism is, therefore, crucial in some respects (Smith 2025; Klein 2025). The question remains, though, what differentiates her temporal politics of nostalgia from all others that similarly call themselves conservative and display nostalgia for specific aspects of the past?
Before discussing Takaichi Sanae’s temporal politics in more detail, I want to lay out parts of the rich literature on the relationship of politics and temporality in many industrialized countries’ current conjuncture. Many authors have attributed and discussed the foreclosure of a democratic future and presentism as the dominant characteristics of our time (White 2025; Bauman 2017). From the “endtimes fascism” of the US right (Klein, Taylor 2025) to the neoliberal fascism of the German AfD (Göpffarth 2021), “today’s reactionaries and futurists both harness and profit from the same temporal crises of our present” (Nilges 2020). Simply put, in the absence of utopian promises and projects, nostalgia becomes the dominant affective force. The famous sociologist Zygmunt Bauman offered a fascinating argument for the role of anxiety in the emergence of the contemporary “global epidemic of nostalgia” (2017).
As he argued, global neoliberalism introduced violence on a significant scale into everyday life. Competition, precarity, and the fear of post-Cold War “end of history”-style, seemingly nihilistic and random acts of violence (e.g. terrorism) have created an immense feeling of anxiety. In his words, “neoliberalism injects violence into our lives, and fear into our politics. […] and vice versa; violence into politics, and fear into our lives” (Bauman 2017: 19). Temporally, neoliberal “presentism” treats politics as a continues technocratic engagement with immediate concerns and promises nothing more than “more of the same” (Hartog 2017; Bauman 2017: 128). Relief for the felt anxiety is, hence, not in sight. In such a vein, nostalgia can be understood as a reaction to the anti-nostalgia of neoliberal and technocratic elites, which are only focused on the now (Kenny 2017). However, there is a step from longing to affective investment in a specific project that nostalgia has to take to become politically relevant.
As Svetlana Boym has noted, nostalgia is not only a “sentiment of loss and displacement, but […] also a romance with one’s own fantasy” (Boym 2001). One’s own fantasy, however, does not exist outside of politics, and is in need of interpellation by political actors. Furthermore, one’s fantasy is not just a recreation of an idealized past, but, potentially, also an engagement with a desired future. As Kenny has stated for the rising radical right, nostalgia can function as a way to “reconfigure the future through reference to the reinvented national past” (Kenny 2017: 5). Based in a post-foundational ontology, Knott (2024) has laid out how a Laclauian notion of politics in time treats the present as the necessity and contingency which shape the ground in which agency (populist articulation as break with the hegemonic now) opens up many possible futures. Laclau, hence, offers an “open account of time versus a closed future determined by the past and present, and […] subsequently, the presentation not of the future in the singular but of multiple futures” (Knott 2024: 14). Such a conception then allows not only regressive forms of nostalgia, as a mere return to something that never was, but also prefigurative nostalgias. To illustrate, Göpffarth (2021: 68) has shown how East German Afd supporters merge nostalgia for dissident activism in the GDR to legitimise current individual activism and politicization create “the basis for a hopeful far-right activism for an alternative, guiltfree future”.
To refer to Bauman once more, a retrotopia surely is a spatially fixed return to safety, but in a prefigurative way, potentially merges a constructed past with the perceived potentiality of the present to create an enjoyable future. One illustrative example was discussed by Narita (2024). Occupying certain spaces with reactionary aesthetics, such as the infamous Yasukuni Shrine during the day of remembrance of Japan’s defeat in war, can have utopian aspirations as it allows to live the point of nostalgia in the present and interacts with the now through mobilization and contestation (Narita 2024). As I propose, Takaichi’s retrotopian enjoyment relies on prefigurative nostalgia around techno-utopianism, which is supposed to ensure continuity from past, present, to future.
Let’s turn to Takaichi, then. Her push for constitutional revision and her reactionary ideology are discussed widely (Shibata 2026; Kamikubo 2026). However, an often-overlooked tendency emerges quickly If one engages with Takaichi’s latest publications and her political past. Namely, a utopian project. Three recent publications that carry her name center around supposed ways to revive growth and national strength in the face of a rising China and deal with space policy, cybersecurity, and technological research and development, much more than political ideals or Japanese history (Takaichi 2021, 2024, 2025). This stands in stark contrast to her predecessor (e.g. Ishiba 2024). Fittingly, Takaichi laid out, in a speech to the 93rd LDP party congress on the 12th of April, how her understanding of conservatism incorporates the future:
In my view, the essence of conservatism lies in preserving worthy traditions and order while at the same time realizing progress and reform. […] A nation that refuses to take on challenges has no future. Politics concerned only with preserving the status quo can never inspire hope.[3]
A focus on inspiring hope has been integral to Prime Minister Abe Shinzō’s project, arguably. His legacy in her temporal strategy must be emphasized at this point.
Back in 2006, as Abe Shinzō took the position of Prime Minister for the first time, Takaichi was made minister of state for innovation, and was put in charge of the newly found Innovation 25 Strategy Council (Inobēshon 25 Senryaku Kaigi). The council worked under the directive to find ways to ensure sustainable growth and prosperity under conditions of population decline.[4] Jennifer Robertson has discussed the initiative in detail as a traditionalist utopia and has traced how the basis for the strategy was already outlined in Abe’s 2006 book Towards a Beautiful Japan (Utsukushii kuni e). The book featured a romanticized and aestheticized version of an ethnonationalist past, with the clear goal of retrieving what was lost (pride and self-confidence in what is “Japanese”) and utilizing technological progress for ensuring the longevity of this retrieval (Robertson 2018: 33-35).
A manga version of Innovation 2025 was produced, which centered around a day in the life of the Inobe family (from the Japanese loanword inobeeshon) in the year 2025. Takaichi penned the preface to it. The story offers nothing more than small windows into the family’s daily activities and musings. These snippets reveal a conservative grounding on family values and economic relations, however. Examples are the father of the multi-generational household taking pride in Japanese robots, as top-tier technological innovations, working as part of a joint transnational moon exploration (Eguchi 2007: 19); the grandmother being thankful that due to teleworking technology, her daughter-in-law can easily work from home; and the grandfather of the family remaining mobile and working outside of the home as a productive member of society (ibid., 42-44, 58). Just from these examples, one can understand Robertson’s conclusion that the affective utopian element of this narrative lies in the assurance to protect what is seen as “traditional” Japanese values, namely the ie family system and the imperial household, and enable its continuation thanks to technological progress (Robertson 2018: 36). The manga certainly feels very outdated (its aesthetics more reminiscent of 1970s or 1980s manga) read in 2026, and not many of the promises made back then have come to fruition. However, framings around the Tokyo 2020 Olympics and the Osaka Expo 2025 carried forth this national-traditionalist techno-utopian imagery (Waldenberger 2020). This techno-utopianism is built upon a nationalist antagonism.
With the assertion of the post-2012 Abe LDP to “take back Japan” (Nihon o torimodosu), it should be clear that the conservation of the status quo is not the affective goal, but rather, in much of global right-wing politics, tropes of leftism having distorted what ought to be, play a large role. This is certainly true for contemporary politics as well. Former Abe supporter and founder of the Conservative Party of Japan, Hyakuta Naoki explained his motivation as grounded in opposition to the Anti-LGBTQI+-discrimination legislation passed under LDP-PM Kishida.[5] A general sense of crisis among conservatives about a “left-turn” of the post-Abe LDP has led to much dissent on the right, and Takaichi is surely profiting from re-uniting some parts (Eder-Ramsauer 2025). The Takaichi government features many radical conservative politicians, such as Kimi Onoda or Katayama Satsuki. Finance Minister Katayama complements Takaichi’s more economy focused publications with her recent book on “common sense conservatism” (jōshikihoshu) (Katayama 2025) in which not much time is wasted talking about economics. Much rather, reactionary points about what is Japanese tradition and the nuisance caused by Chinese traffic participants are debated at length. Takaichi’s anti-foreigner posturing is similarly prominent:
I was raised in the land of Yamato and will lay down my life to protect our ancient traditions. With the increase in foreigners, we are seeing situations that get on people’s nerves in terms of fairness and unfairness, justice and injustice. (Takaichi Sanae during the LDP leadership contest, cited by Burgess 2026)
As I, hopefully, made clear, reference to the old name for Japan, Yamato, is no mere regressive return to pre-industrial time, but the appeal to a retrotopia able to achieve and preserve. This analysis revealed that conservative crisis rhetoric about population ageing and decline are not the only ways to achieve nationalist emotional manipulation (Yamaura 2024). More so, as two sides of the same coin, while people come to see “the continued stability of everyday life as intricately tied to the fate of the national community” (Yamaura 2024: 1), they are called upon to experience these “traditional” practices as fights for a better future.
To be sure, the support of the LDP under PM Takaichi—and before—is not omnipotent. Other conservative parties are much more effective in mobilizing young voters, for one. Crucially, though, two things are absent in the retrotopias we find among the current winners of Japanese politics: an emancipatory moment and a plan for a sustainable planetary future. On the latter, one ought to be aware that under conditions of looming planetary collapse, techno-utopianism is a risky strategy at best,[6] a disastrous one doomed to fail at worst (Saitō 2024). On the former, emancipatory movements ought not to rely solely on rational argumentation, such as the necessity for migration due to population decline, as they are surely in an affective disadvantage in the face of Takaichi’s retrotopian affect.
AUTHOR
Andreas Eder-Ramsauer is a Predoctoral Researcher in the Department of East Asian Studies at the University of Vienna, Austria. He holds B.A. and M.A. degrees from Freie Universität Berlin. His research focuses on conservatism and its hegemony in Japan, populism, post-structuralist discourse theory, radical democratic theory, and the history of Japanese political thought. His recent publications include Democratic Futures Now! (special issue of Minikomi: Austrian Journal of Japanese Studies, 2025) and “Introduction to the Special Issue: Democratic Futures Now!” (2025). His work examines contemporary Japanese conservatism, populism, and democratic theory from the perspective of discourse analysis.
NOTES
[1] https://www.jiji.com/jc/article?k=2026071600709&g=pol&p=20260716ax04S&rel=pv
[2] https://chihei.net/?p=2819
[3] https://www.jimin.jp/news/press/212972.html
[4] https://www.aec.go.jp/kaigi/teirei/2007/siryo23/2-1_haifu.pdf
[5] https://www.sankei.com/article/20231017-L6O33ALYWFLIVFSCCDJ3GIXDZE/
[6] https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/solar-geoengineering-risks-moral-hazard-by-daron-acemoglu-2021-04
REFERENCES
Bauman, Zygmunt (2017). Retrotopia. Cambridge, Malden: Polity.
Boym, Svetlana (2001). The Future of Nostalgia. New York, NY: Basic Books.
Burgess, Chris (2026.: “Zaitokukai, Sanseito, and the Sudden Emergence of Anti-Foreigner Populism in the July 2025 House of Councilors Election: Has Japan Reached a Tipping Point?” In Asia-pac. j. 24. DOI: 10.1017/apj.2026.10054.
Eder-Ramsauer, Andreas (2025). “Ein Populistischer Moment? Populistische Parteien und die Wahlen 2024 und 2025.” In David Chiavacci, Iris Wieczorek (eds.), Japan 2025. Politik, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft. München: Iudicium, pp. 39–61.
Eguchi, Katsuhiko (2007). 2025nen Inobeke no 1nichi. Inobēshon de Nihon wa kō kawaru! (The Future of Japan Innovation 25). With assistance of Ryūji Fujii. Tōkyō, 東京: PHP Kenkyūjo; PHP研究所.
Göpffarth, Julian (2021). “Activating the Socialist Past for a Nativist Future: Far-Right Intellectuals and the Prefigurative Power of Multidirectional Nostalgia in Dresden.” In Social Movement Studies 20 (1), pp. 57–74. DOI: 10.1080/14742837.2020.1722628.
Hartog, François (2017). Regimes of Historicity: Presentism and Experiences of Time. New York: Columbia University Press.
Ishiba, Shigeru (2024). Hoshu seijika. Wagaseisaku, wagatenmei. Tōkyō: Kōdansha.
Kamikubo, Masato (2026). Sendō seiji. Hōkatsuseitō to shite no Jimintō o hakai shita sairento majoriti no shōtai. Tōkyō: Sanseidō.
Katayama, Satsuki (2025). “Jōshiki hoshu” no susume. Tōkyō: Asukashinsha.
Kenny, Michael (2017). “Back to the Populist Future? Understanding Nostalgia in Contemporary Ideological Discourse.” In Journal of Political Ideologies 22 (3), pp. 256–273. DOI: 10.1080/13569317.2017.1346773.
Klein, Axel (2025). “Prof. Klein: It Is Difficult to Label Japanese PM Takaichi a Populist, Despite Her Nationalism and Anti-Feminism.” In European Center for Populism Studies. Available online at https://www.populismstudies.org/prof-klein-it-is-difficult-to-label-japanese-pm-takaichi-a-populist-despite-her-nationalism-and-anti-feminism/.
Klein, Naomi; Taylor, Astra (2025). “The Rise of End Times Fascism.” In Guardian. Available online at https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2025/apr/13/end-times-fascism-far-right-trump-musk.
Knott, Andy (2024). “Introduction: Populism, Metaphor, Temporality.” In Andy Knott (ed.), Populism and Time: Temporalities of a Disruptive Politics. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Nakajima, Takeshi; Ishiba, Shigeru (2024). “Sōsaisen o mae ni ‘hoshu to wa nani ka’ o kangaeru.” In Gekkan Nihon 28 (9), pp. 26–33.
Narita, Karin (2024). “Return to Utopia? Vision and Practice of the Japanese Right at Yasukuni Shrine.” In Journal of Political Ideologies, pp. 1–22. DOI: 10.1080/13569317.2024.2418189.
Nilges, Mathias (2020). Right-Wing Culture in Contemporary Capitalism: Regression and Hope in a Time without Future. London: Bloomsbury Academic.
Robertson, Jennifer Ellen (2018). Robo Sapiens Japanicus: Robots, Gender, Family, and the Japanese Nation. Oakland, California: University of California Press.
Saitō, Kōhei (2024). Slow Down: How Degrowth Communism Can Save the Earth. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson.
Shibata, Ria (2026). “The Protest and the Supermajority: Japanese Pacifism, Generational Renegotiation, and the Coming Constitutional Reckoning.” In Asia Pacific Journal: Japan Focus 24. Available online at https://apjjf.org/2026/5/shibata.
Smith, Sheila A. (2025). “Understanding Takaichi Sanae: Sheila Smith on Japan’s First Female Prime Minister.” In Council on Foreign Relations. Available online at https://www.cfr.org/articles/potential-impact-takaichi-sanae-japans-first-female-prime-minister-conversation-dr-sheila.
Takaichi, Sanae (2021). Utsukushiku, tsuyoku, seichō suru kuni e. Watashi no “Nihonkeizai kyōjin-ka keikaku.” Tōkyō: WAC Inc.
Takaichi, Sanae (ed.) (2024). Kokuryoku kenkyū: Nipponrettō o, tsuyoku yutaka ni. Tōkyō: Sankei Shinbun Shuppan.
Takaichi, Sanae (2025). Nihon o mamoru tsuyoku yutaka ni. 4th ed. Tōkyō: WAC Inc.
Yamaura, Chigusa (2024). “An Imagined Shrinking Community: Japanese Nationalism and the Chronology of the Future.” In Japanese Studies, pp. 1–23. DOI: 10.1080/10371397.2023.2298295.
Waldenberger, Franz (2020). “The Olympic and Paralympic Games as a Technology Showcase.” In Barbara G. Holthus, Isaac Gagné, Wolfram Manzenreiter, and Franz Waldenberger (eds.), Japan through the Lens of the Tokyo Olympics. New York: Routledge, p. 136.
White, Jonathan (2024). In the Long Run: The Future as a Political Idea. London: Profile Books.