Name: 'Japanese first': Japan's minority gov't projected to lose control of upper house to far-right party
Uploaded: 2025-07-20T17:18:46.000Z
Duration: 4 min 50 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Participle clauses

To Japan now, where exit polls project the country's governing coalition will lose its majority in the upper house of parliament, piling more pressure on embattled Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba.

Ishiba leads a shaky minority government.

Basic passive voice

In the lower house, the right-wing populist party San Seito, running under a Japanese first platform, is projected to make strong gains.

As a sagging economy has sparked anti-foreigner sentiment in Japan, Sunday's results could lead to calls from within his own party for Shigeru Ishiba to step down or find another coalition partner.

Let's get more analysis on this, and with that, I'm joined now by Geoffrey Hall, Special Lecturer at Kanda University of International Studies, and he joins me now from Tokyo.

So what do these election results now mean for Ishiba and his government?

Well, in this case, Mr. Ishiba is going to lose his majority in the upper house.

He already lost his majority in the lower house.

So this is going to make it much more difficult for him and his party to get bills passed.

But the good news is that there are center-right parties that are willing or have been willing to work with the LDP when they need to pass the budget and pass other bills.

And after losing their majority in the lower house last year, they've been able to clear the budget very easily.

So it is foreseeable that Mr. Ishiba could have a cooperative relationship with these center-right parties, or he could reach out to the far right.

Well, can you walk us through what caused this shift among Japanese voters?

Well, the shift was, as your report said a little bit earlier, caused a lot by economic conditions in the country in the last year.

And there have been, over the past 10 years, a significant increase in immigrants.

The LDP didn't really call it immigration, but there was 1 million new immigrants who came into the country.

And the far right has used this, calling it a stealth immigration policy, to attack the mainstream conservatives and hit them from the right on immigration.

And we're going to see a far right that has almost 20, maybe even more than 20, seats in the upper house.

And they will be unrestrained in the kind of language that they could use referring to immigrants.

Before, the LDP was a big tent party, and it did have some far right people, but they were moderated.

But now these people are outside of the LDP, and they will be saying some rather extreme things, I think.

And how has all this been, what's the reaction to this, we'll say, from within Japan?

I think the mainstream media is shocked because they spent the last two weeks trying to debunk a lot of the misinformation being spread by this far right party.

But it seems to have failed spectacularly.

But a lot of the people who support the far right get their news on the internet, so they don't trust what newspapers and television say anyway.

And so we're beginning to see right wing populism in Japan, something that people said wasn't really happening in Japan, but has been happening in Europe and in North America.

These people have been elected for the next six years.

And so they're going to be around and they're going to be saying rather extreme things.

Now, Geoffrey, we're running out of time.

How can this change Japan's path going forward, especially on the international stage?

Well, Prime Minister Ishiba is going to be in a rather weak position negotiating with President Trump because Trump will see him as a weak and embattled leader.

So this may harm his ability to act like he's a tough guy in the negotiations with Trump because Trump knows that he's not a tough guy.

Very interesting speaking to you and getting that analysis from Japan.