Japan is gripped by an unprecedented political crisis that has been entirely obscured in the media around the globe.

On July 24, the day after the Upper House elections, all the morning newspapers in Japan featured headlines screaming out that Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba had been pressured by his party, the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) to accept responsibility for the party’s losses like a good sport and resign.

Most everyone who read the headlines assumed his administration was over but then, that afternoon, Ishiba announced that he had never agreed to resign.

At the same time, the newspapers in English, and in Japanese as well, were full of reports that Japan had made immense concessions regarding tariffs, opened the agricultural market completely to American GMO imports, and agreed to buy a pile of outdated American weapons, and that Japanese would invest tens of billions of dollars in the United States.

But statements from the Prime Minister’s Office later suggested that the negotiations were far from over and that no final agreement had been reached.

The entire Japanese media had been weaponized against the prime minster so as to force-feed a trade agreement deeply damaging to Japan and use that agreement, being introduced to the world as a “done deal,” to pressure South Korea and Taiwan to make massive concessions as well.

The narrative fed to the entire world in the mainstream media, but also the alternative media, was that Japanese were so fed up with the corruption of the LDP and its inability to address the crisis of inflation, a sagging economy, and a tariff crisis, that the voters had given the LDP a decisive vote of no-confidence.

But, instead of electing progressive or leftist candidates, the Japanese voters selected more radical right-wing parties like the new Sanseito Party. Japan was mysteriously becoming more conservative, just like the United States and Germany.

It is true that the majority coalition in Japan’s Upper House of the LDP and Komei Party has been reduced to 122 seats and the majority of 126 is now in the hands of opposition parties, thus opening up the policy formulation process (which takes place in the Upper House) for the first time in decades.

But the fairy tale of a bankrupt LDP run by an incompetent Shigeru Ishiba seems to have been made up by various intelligence operatives outside of Japan.

The following day, July 25, more than a thousand Japanese of every political stripe, especially progressives who one would assume hate the LDP by reading The New York Times, showed up for a protest in support of Ishiba in front of the Prime Minister’s Office.

Holding banners and chanting, “Ishiba, don’t give up!” they kept up their support for the prime minister in the face of an entire corporate system that was determined to force his resignation. For the first time, the corporate media were forced to recognize this political movement.

The following week, members of the LDP continued to harangue Ishiba, demanding his immediate resignation—which was reported for an entire week as if it were already decided.

Nikkei (Japanese version) published a popular opinion survey (July 27) that indicated that the Sanseito was the most popular party after the LDP and that its popularly had increased 6% whereas the LDP had fallen 6%. Supposedly support for Ishiba was down to 32% and only 6% of those surveyed responded that Ishiba should continue on indefinitely as prime ministers.

But Ishiba became only the more adamant that he would not resign in his statements on July 30, and an even larger rally supporting Ishiba of an increasingly progressive character was held on August 1 in front of the LDP headquarters.

Although the dust has yet to clear, it appears that the drive to force Ishiba to resign was a botched color revolution that lacked effectiveness, perhaps, because the Trump administration has dismissed all the competent operatives at the U.S. Embassy and intelligence and replaced them with hacks working for Palantir.

In any case, something has gone terribly wrong in that operation.

Ishiba is popular with bureaucrats and he also has impressed a broad swath of the population who have seen how he avoided drawing attention to himself while working quietly to resist the impossible demands made of Japan by the Trump administration and a Washington gone insane.

Thus, the low-key Ishiba is becoming a central figure in the resistance to the takeover of the entire world, or at least those countries with deep ties to Washington, D.C., by the Trump administration, and specifically the private intelligence octopus Palantir and other intelligence upstarts under the direction of Stephen Feinberg, the master of private equity for military contractors and current Deputy Secretary of Defense. All this is happening without much coverage in the Western media which, whether alternative, progressive, socialist, libertarian or conspiracy, is hopelessly ignorant about Asia.

Ishiba is a conservative politician with deep corporate ties, that is true, and the policies that he advanced as Minister of Defense, such as his ideas of an “Asian NATO,” were not very constructive or even creative. Yet he was never a “yes” man for Washington.

The LDP is not really a political party but a loose association of powerful factions, and Ishiba has remained quite independent within the LDP, in part, because he has a strong and loyal base in Tottori Prefecture that gives him relative freedom of action.

He follows in the tradition of the upstart LDP politician Tanaka Kakuei, the king of construction, who sought a way forward for Japan that meant greater independence from the United States.

Tanaka Kakuei was a close friend of Ishiba’s father Ishiba Jiro who was also deeply involved in construction politics.

Ishiba is called a conservative, but he has been under constant attack from the far right for being too friendly to Korea and China. It is remarkable that, unlike other LDP politicians, he avoids screaming out insults to Japan’s Asian neighbors, ostentatious visits to Yasukuni Shrine to pay tribute to the architects of the war on China and Southeast Asia, or other actions intended to provoke conflict.

Ishiba is given little credit in the Western media despite his being the only rational and diplomatic leader of a G7 nation, and perhaps the most thoughtful leader in the entire G30.

Of course, Ishiba has gone along with much of what big brother America has dictated. Yet his team has resisted many of the extreme demands of Trump at the working level and, quietly, Japan has become a force globally for subtle resistance to growing totalitarianism.

Japan is the fourth-largest economy in the world and a member of the G7—so it is as establishment as you get. And yet, under Ishiba (who happens to be Catholic and has a commitment to ideals and beliefs to a degree rare in Japanese politics), Japan accepted two Palestinians for treatment in Japan on March 25 at just the moment that the push to line up behind Israel reached its apex.

Japan has not clamped down on anti-Israel demonstrations at home in the brutal manner that has been seen in Britain, Germany and the United States either. Mainstream politicians are not afraid to address the Palestinian issue in public.

Part of Japan’s relative objectivity about Israel is related to the dearth of Christians in Japan.

Unlike the U.S., Germany, France, Britain, or even South Korea and Taiwan, there is no significant Christian population, and no fundamentalist churches, that are easily manipulated by Israel.

Also, Ishiba intentionally (I believe) missed the NATO meeting in The Hague on June 24^th. He was willing to be subject to extensive criticism so that Japan could stay as far away as possible from the build-up for war with Russia that Germany and Great Britain have been sucked into.

What is more, when Israel attacked Iran on June 13, Ishiba stated unambiguously, “That attack was totally unacceptable.”

He had to face political reality and state that he “understood” the American bombing of Iran later but, even then, he did not voice support for the American action.

As far as the power elite in Washington was concerned, this low-key insider who knows the defense industry like a professional was starting to display a level of personal bravery and political intelligence that was intolerable in the normally docile Japan.

Precedents for the Takedown of Ishiba

It is important to note that this Washington-led campaign to take down Ishiba is the fourth effort in recent years to crack down on politics in Japan and Korea—although even the Western conspiracy channels are silent about all of them.

First, there was the color revolution to take down South Korea President Park Geun-hye, most likely first planned by various U.S.-centered private intelligence (although the details remain murky). The deeply corrupt progressive political forces in Korea were happy to push well-meaning citizens into Gwanghwamun Square for moving candlelight demonstrations demanding Park’s impeachment as part of a cynical game.

Of course, the corruption charges against Park were mostly accurate, and one could even make the argument that she could be impeached for that corruption, but she was not much more corrupt than the opposition Democratic Party that was suddenly sold to the public as the progressive alternative. The stories about Park’s conspiracies with shamans, and late-night orgies with young men, however, were made up, as was much of the garbage that progressives fed to their audiences in a horrific betrayal of their noble roots in the labor movements of the 1980s.

The truth was that Washington elites decided that Park had to go because she was pushing forward for a comprehensive security agreement with China, and seeking opportunities for engagement with Russia while calling herself a “conservative” and that they could not tolerate.

The second case was the assassination of Mayor Park Won-soon when he resisted demands for Covid lockdowns in Seoul. Supposedly, Park committed suicide on July 9, 2020, after being accused of sexual harassment by a female public official.

For the record, I have seen how Park promoted women in city hall and the careful and respectful attitude he showed toward women. Those who actually knew him did not believe this story.

The third case was the assassination of Shinzo Abe on July 8, 2022 (almost exactly two years after Park’s death), which I wrote about here, because he tried to avoid the push by Washington to drag Japan into the drive for war with Russia and China through a series of clever diplomatic moves.

The Current Crisis

Japan is facing an unprecedented crisis in its relationship with the United States that has reached the breaking point, and yet very few dare to talk about it in public.

First, the Pentagon is working to create a new chain of command, and shifting responsibilities for the Self Defense Forces in a manner that would allow the United States to trigger a military conflict with China and then pull American forces back, leaving Japan to do the actual fighting and dying on its own, Ukrainian style.

Kyodo News reported on July 27 that the Japanese military is being enabled to take on the Chinese military in the first island chain (Okinawa, Taiwan and Philippines) and the U.S. would pull back and offer support and the threat of nuclear weapons against China.

That process is enabled by the new joint force command (with an office in Akasaka district of Tokyo now) that has been set up to encourage Japan to increasingly take responsibility for confrontations with China.

The cover story is that Japan and the U.S. will have a command center in Japan that is better suited for actual combat, but the reality is that the new scenarios for war being drafted have the fighting directed from Japan, not Hawaii, and Japanese soldiers will do the vast majority of the dying.

This drive to push Japan into a massive proxy war is combined with a privatization of the chain of command for U.S. Forces Japan, and the Self-Defense Forces by outsourcing everything via doubtful AI systems to Amazon, Oracle, Palantir, Google and other multinational corporations which essentially will take over the militaries of the entire world—and can feed whatever information, or misinformation, they wish to the generals.

That effort is combined with pressure on Japan to vastly increase its military budget, buying large amounts of overpriced U.S. weapons that will set off an arms race in Asia that Japan cannot possibly win.

Then there is the plan to force Japan, through this political decapitation at the very moment that negotiations are at their hardest, into accepting a suicidal trade agreement that allows U.S. agribusiness to flood the Japanese market with GMO products from factory farms and thereby destroy what remains of Japanese farming (thus assuring that, if there is a major crisis that halts trade, many Japanese will starve to death like the North Koreans did after the fall of the Soviet Union).

The agreement also imposes highly unfavorable terms for Japan in automotive and other fields, while granting U.S. financial interests unprecedented power to muck around in the Japanese economy.

Finally, Japan is being pressured to invest many tens of billions of dollars in the United States, much of which will be skimmed off by Trump and his friends for their personal benefit.

Taking down Ishiba at this moment is critical because they intend to use their success in Japan as a justification to force a similar trade deal on South Korea and Taiwan.

However, Ishiba is no fool. He has used back-channel exchanges with the Constitutional Democratic Party of Yukio Hatoyama and now Yoshihiko Noda to build consensus far beyond the LDP. He proposed that Japan and the Republic of Korea sign their own defense treaty independent of the United States, and he even supported the plans of Professor Nobuhiro Suzuki of the University of Tokyo to implement sustainable agriculture in Japan without GMOs.

That plan flew in the face of the reduction of farmland and the increase in dependency on pesticides and GMO seeds from the U.S. that are destroying Japan’s independence as farmers are literally bribed by the Japanese government (under pressure from U.S. agribusiness) to give up farming.

It is fascinating to see Japan experts from America stating what an incompetent idiot Ishiba is when he is clearly one of the smartest and bravest politicians in recent Japanese history. What is clear is that Washington wants a politician like Shinjiro Koizumi, a product of CSIS who will buy into just about any American plan, or Sanae Takaichi, who became famous as an expert on the U.S. Congress.

The Sanseito Party: Secret Weapon of the Globalists

The opposition that the globalists carefully groomed to emerge after the controlled demolition of the LDP could not be one that actually intended to change the economy and the political system. It had to be a right-wing party that addresses real conspiracies that other parties could not touch in its statements, but tied truth-telling to racism, chauvinism, militarism, and authoritarian practices. That could only be achieved by keeping the progressive parties from saying anything about state crimes like Covid-19, the militarization of the economy, or the takeover of government by global finance, and limiting the statements of progressives to bland pronouncements on fairness, inclusiveness, women’s rights, and peace that lacked any analytical depth.

This formula is what was used for the establishment of MAGA in the United States (which eventually took over the entire Republican Party) and Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) in Germany. These racist, anti-immigration, militaristic political parties are funded by globalists so that they attract a substantial following by default simply because they are the only parties that are permitted to address state crimes which the progressive and leftist parties are banned from discussing.

That is to say that MAGA and AfD are able to address, at least on the fringes, the Covid-19 scam, vaccine deaths, the false official narrative about 9/11, and the complete takeover of government by dark forces serving the billionaires, and the unbridled power of private equity using central banks.

Interestingly, Kai Masayasu, the proportional representation candidate in the Social Democratic Party, was unique in his criticism of American militarism and Japanese policy towards Israel and who addressed the dangers of vaccines, was completely ignored by media and in spite of his strong following, drawing far larger crowds than other candidates, received a ridiculously low 11,000 votes in the election.

In the recent Japanese election, the progressive parties like Reiwa Shinsengumi, the Japanese Communist Party, and the Social Democratic Party could have massively increased their representation if they had addressed the real concerns of Japanese.

But their campaigns were limited to discussions about reducing or abolishing the consumption tax, allowing women to retain their surnames after marriage, and vague statements about peace and inclusiveness.

Progressive parties were silent on real threats to Japan: the drive for war with China being led by the U.S., the militarization of the Japanese economy, the radical concentration of wealth, the destruction of agriculture, the complete destruction of local economies, and the elimination of jobs that is forcing female college graduates into prostitution, and leading to homelessness and even hunger.

Additionally, they have nothing to say about the negative consequence of the COVID-19 lockdowns, and side effects bred by th COVID-19 vaccines, which Japanese took more injections per person than just about any population on earth.

None of the progressives can talk about these horrors. The far-right party that is permitted to discuss them is the Sanseito Party.

The Sanseito is able to oppose the Pandemic Treaty and to offer overt criticism of vaccines. It was allowed to denounce mandatory masks for the Covid-19 fraud. The party continues to defend agriculture and emphasize food security, even questioning the use of GMOs. It even offered funding to support families with more than one child.

In addition, Sanseido called for the defense of Japanese culture from its destruction by a banal globalist consumption culture. It denounced the power of finance capitalism on local communities.

Sohei Kamiya is the leader of Sanseito and he grabbed the headlines in a manner that suggests that corporations wanted him to be famous, just as they wanted Trump to be famous.

His book The Sanseito Party: Waking up Our Citizens from Their Sleep established him as a truth-teller figure, even as he embraced militarism, nuclear power, hostility to China, and the nuclear armament of Japan.

In this book Kamiya attacked powerful corporations which make profits from vaccines and demanded the use of masks by using the media to create an unnecessary panic over Covid-19. He was explicit about the power of international financial capital and multinational corporations, and he tied their activities to Israel and Zionism. Although many of his arguments are simplistic, and some explicitly anti-Semitic, he spoke truths about global capital and Zionism that no one else in Japan dared utter.

However, his solution was a fascistic “Japan first” ideology that explicitly promoted racist policies like those being implemented in the United States and Europe—he is merely repackaging the same content for a Japanese audience.

The “Japan first” theme in this book, and in the campaign, seems to be less of an imitation of Donald Trump, as a use of the “Asia first” statements made by Elbridge Colby, the grandson of William Colby (CIA director) and current undersecretary for defense policy.

Kamiya employs Colby’s arguments that the preparations for war with China should be the primary focus for the Japanese military and that Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan must massively increase their defense spending because they will be doing the fighting while the US provides the ideological content.

Elbridge published a book Asia First: A New Military Strategy for America in Japanese (that does not exist in English) putting forth this argument that has no appeal for Japanese. In this context, the term “Japan first” means not so much prioritizing Japan’s national interests, as it means that Japan will be the first to be drawn into a war with China.

But the ties to Trump go much deeper than that. The MAGA lobbyist and political operative Mathew Martin Braynard is officially registered with FARA as a representative of Sanseito in the U.S. and he was photographed with Kamiya before the election.

The FARA report for Braynard includes a line that states that his role is “to win election in Japan.”

In addition, Matt Gaetz, who was forced to step down from the Trump administration because of his involvement in drug and prostitution rackets, now runs the Trump media operation One America News. He hosted Braynard and offered support to Sanseito.

Not only does the Sanseito Party blame foreigners for all of Japan’s problems, its operatives used violence against their opponents at rallies in a manner that brought ICE to mind. I saw several Sanseito political gatherings. They did not seem to have any popular support but were run by operatives who worked within the Sanseito.

Many aspects of the administration of Sanseito resemble a cult, drawing in members, especially men, who are alienated and discouraged, and infusing them with new cultural confidence.

Sanseito’s most vocal candidate, Sayaka Shioiri, showed her true colors when she exclaimed that “I want to be everyone’s mother.” She was cribbing a line from the Unification Church “heavenly family” strategy for drawing lonely individuals into an authoritarian family structure.

There is considerable evidence that Sanseito relies on Unification Church methods for recruiting members, and that members of Unification Church are involved in building its organization.

Using a charismatic leader who serves acts a parental figure and creating a culture with religious codes and restrictions that refuses to allow any open debate on policy is central to the Sanseito way. Appealing to alienated and lonely men with a rhetoric of self-confidence and cultural superiority is also part of the approach.

The influence of Unification Church, the anti-communist religious community and political movement established by the charismatic Reverend Sun Myung Moon which took off in the 1970s with support from wealthy forces in the U.S., South Korea, and Japan, extends to MAGA itself.

Steven Hassan explains in his book The Cult of Trump: A Leading Cult Expert Explains How the President Uses Mind Control (2019) how MAGA relies on precisely the same techniques for social and ideological control perfected by the Unification Church (with help from the CIA).

Hassan should know as he was a member of the Unification Church who struggled for years to escape.

There may be a subterranean battle between the two great religious-political blocks in Japan: the Sokagakkai cult which established and runs the Komei Party as a means for political control and the Unification Church (now fragmented into various factions, but still powerful) which may be covertly building up the Sanseito. After the suspicious assassination of Abe, all blame for that act was placed (unfairly) on the Unification Church and for two years that political body was forced underground while Sokagakkai faced almost no criticism for unethical actions and its massive influence in Japanese politics.

On July 28, Political News Japan announced that Kamiya and Yamanaka intend to visit Washington DC to meet with Trump’s team in August, and promise that they will come up with creative solutions to the tariff conflict as the “anti-globalists” that they are, solutions that Ishiba has failed miserably to deliver.

Yamanaka has ready met repeatedly with Steve Yates (former head of Radio Free Asia and head of the media consulting firm DC International Advisory) and Fred Fleitz, author of An America First Approach to U.S. National Security. Charlie Kirk plans to visit Japan in September to speak with Japanese students about a new movement of conservative youth.

Many Japanese insiders believe that the election was rigged and that the anti-immigrant rhetoric of the Sanseito did not have that much appeal for even conservative Japanese. The violent attacks of Sanseito operatives on those protesting their rallies put off many. Although the Sanseito’s ability to voice an anti-vaccine and anti-globalist position did have appeal, it remains suspicious that a political party with no infrastructure and only inflammatory YouTube videos could win that many seats.

Setting the Foundation for World War?

When I asked those gathered to support Ishiba at the event on July 25 why they were making this effort to support someone who is so clearly part of the establishment, they told me that they were certain that, if Ishiba was driven from office, he would be replaced with someone under orders to prepare for war with China, and that such a shift would be the beginning of the end for Japan.

Increasingly, the terrible fears that Japanese have harbored, but could not express, are coming to the forefront and taking the initial form among citizens of an unexpected rallying on behalf of Ishiba at this historic moment. Whether that effort is successful remains to be seen.

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