Trolling Tokyo

Making sense of the wildest Governor's race in city history

Here we go again.

Following from last week, I’m continuing with recording voiceovers of my essays. Love it? Hate it? Let me know what you think!

Tokyo holds a gubernatorial election every four years. The next one is this coming Sunday, July 7. I’ve been living in Tokyo since 2003, so I’ve seen my share of governors come and go. But I have never seen an electoral contest quite like the one that’s unfolding in the city right now. It calls to mind an old idiom, hyakki yagyo, “the night parade of a hundred demons,” in which a horde of yokai take to the streets to freak out civilized folk. The 2024 Tokyo gubernatorial race is a political hyakki yagyo.

This year’s contest has a historic fifty-plus contenders. However, almost half are being fielded by a group calling themselves the “Protect Japan From NHK Party,” far-right conspiracy theorists whose platform consists mainly of trying to embarrass the national broadcaster NHK. (In a premonition of what might happen should any of their candidates actually win, the party eked out a victory in the 2022 House of Councilors election, only to have their man expelled eight months later for failing to show up to a single legislative session.) This year, the same party has tossed a monkey wrench into the works by “hijacking the poster boards” (in their own words), selling off their allotted spaces to anyone willing to pay them a fee. There is nothing explicitly against this in the rules, because nobody ever imagined anything like it happening. It has thrown this cycle’s election displays into chaos.

Tokyo’s electoral races, whether for governor or parliamentary seats, have always attracted a certain number of stunt candidates. Registration costs three million yen (equivalent to about $20,000 USD). This is a significant hurdle for average folk, yet low enough to tempt professional influencers looking to expand their reach. For electoral law guarantees every candidate a square on the election poster boards posted all over the city, plus airtime for a political speech on NHK.

The first stunt candidate dates back to 1953, just after the end of the occupation. A businessman ran for parliament for the express purpose of getting word out about his neighborhood confectionery shop. “If we let candidates like this run,” fumed one journalist, “there will be no stopping unethical copycats.” Little did they know how right they were. The stunts continued. In recent years, they have given way to trolling the system itself. Perennial candidate Goto Teruyuki went viral in 2016 when NHK cut his mic as he used his airtime to list regional slang terms for female genitalia. He followed this up in 2020 by stripping and cavorting atop the desk in a diaper. (The real heroes here are NHK’s stalwart sign-language interpreters, who must gamely keep up with whatever the candidate decides to do with their time.)

Thanks to the monkey business with the posters, pedestrians must navigate a gauntlet of punk rockers, porn stars, Kabukicho hosts, Vtuber anime girls, ultranationalists, YouTubers, dating sites, movie ads, and a dog competing for mindshare on their neighborhood boards, right alongside “real” candidates, such as incumbent governor Yuriko Koike and her archrival Renho. You might notice many of these links come from the Twitter feed of Jeffrey J Hall, author of Japan’s Nationalist Right in the Internet Age, who is the one to watch for English-language coverage of the contest.

The fear-of-an-NHK-planet guys aren’t the only spoilers in the race, just the ones with the deepest pockets. The most visible of the troll candidates is cosplaying politician Yusuke Kawai, who has currently adopted the guise of The Joker from Batman. Not the dapper fun-loving criminal from the old Adam West series. The chaos agent from the Christopher Nolan flicks, of whom Michael Caine’s Alfred remarks, “some men just want to watch the world burn.” Fittingly, Kawai spent much of his airtime on NHK cackling into the camera, then used his billboard spaces to post nude photos of a female porn star. He’s joined by contenders running under banners including the AI Mayor (sic), the Nuclear Fusion Party, the Conqueror Party, the Neo Shogunate Party, and the Party to Impeach All Five Supreme Court Judges (perhaps this last one has a future in American politics!)

What any of these people actually believe is almost beside the point, because the point is to get as much attention as humanly possible, by any means necessary. Which leads one to ask: is this “meme wave” a sign of things to come? Has the space-time continuum between the internet and real life ripped in Japan, just as it did in America in 2016, when “we actually elected a meme as president,” as the Washington Post put it?

Hall produced a video explaining the weirdness of Tokyo’s gubernatorial election, which I highly recommend. It explains the situation is more a factor of the peculiarities of Japanese election law than it is a sign of society falling apart. And it is unlikely those laws will change anytime soon, for a measure of chaos and disillusionment among voters benefits the parties in power. The cat-and-mouse games with the authorities and their pesky rules will only continue. Meme candidates “have to become more extreme with their weirdness,” Hall told me in an online conversation. “The fact that the Joker guy went viral internationally and even got a reaction from Elon Musk will only encourage others to try crazier stunts next time.”

So where does this leave us? There’s no question that Japan has political problems. I hear about them all the time from local friends and family. There’s a regular litany of similar complaints. Old-money political families that pass parliamentary seats from parent to child to grandchild as though hereditary. A legislature dominated by elderly male politicians beholden to special interests. Never-ending, unrepentant graft and scandal at the highest levels of government. All of it contributing to depressingly low voter turnouts that make it difficult to view any victory as representing the will of the people.

But the problem is particularly acute among young citizens, who aren’t simply fed up — they’ve given up. Kids here overwhelmingly believe politics are so stacked against them that participating is a total waste of time. 90% of Japanese teens feel Japanese politics are “not clean,” and less than half of Japanese teenagers surveyed believe they can “change society through their own actions.” This is scary, dangerous stuff for a democracy. Disillusionment explains why meme candidates keep coming, and why they find such traction online and off.

Even still, I don’t think Tokyoites are going to vote a meme into the governor’s office, for several reasons. While the poster boards may have been hijacked by a rogue party, the political conversation as a whole has yet to be hijacked by the polarizing culture-war issues that drive America’s national discourse. One reason for this is because of barriers that exist between the internet and traditional media here. Japan has an attention economy, which is why meme candidates exist. But it does not have an outrage economy. There is no 24-7 news cycle, with its ceaseless hunger for hooks to keep viewers engaged, enraged, and addicted.

This links to the bigger reason, which is that “Japanese don’t talk about politics openly,” as media-studies professor Kaori Hayashi told me several years back. “It’s almost taboo, because of the possibility of contentious confrontation.” It’s tough to have a culture war without the angry identity-politics loudmouths. I can count the number of times politics have come up in conversations, even with close friends, on one hand. Couldn’t even guess at who they voted for in whatever election. And I’ve been living here for more than twenty years.

The flip side of this is that young folks, who get nearly all of their information online, feel totally excluded from the news cycle, and by extension, from politics. They don’t see the things that are important to them reflected in the headlines, and they certainly don’t see the elderly overlords who rule the country advocating for their interests. If you think there’s no way you can ever change society, you’re more likely to cheer on transgressive candidates who want to disrupt or even destroy the system.

Sound familiar? I took a lot of heat from a subset of readers for the final chapter of Pure Invention, which portrayed how the very same fantasy-delivery devices that nourish us might also fuel the nightmares of the online era, turbo-charging all of the political weirdness we’re experiencing today. In America, the anonymous imageboard 4chan played the role of chaos agent in the 2016 presidential elections. Today, 4chan is widely reviled for its harassment campaigns and conspiratorial worldview. But it started life in 2003 as a gathering place for teenaged anime fans. Even after its political forums swerved far-right and “anti-woke,” Japanese pop culture continued to color its behavior through the presidential elections and beyond.

What’s interesting is that now we are seeing Japan’s biggest meme-candidate leaning into American pop culture references to disrupt Japanese society. What’s up with this? Perhaps it is simply due to the global popularity of the Batman franchise. But I also think it hints that foreign pop properties can be more useful tools for uniting disruptors than domestic ones. Witness how a subset of fans of imported anime and games unite in support of “anti-woke” causes, while American “K-pop stans” collaborated to sink Trump rallies.

It’s worthy of further study. In the meantime, the parallels are a little worrying. Tokyo may not meme a governor into office this time around, but the kids aren’t all right. As I said, that old saying hyakki yagyo is written with characters meaning “night parade of a hundred yokai.” We’re only seeing a few dozen tricksters and trolls in this election. But if young people continue to believe they have no place in the political system, I suspect we’ll see a lot more in the years to come. Eventually, one might actually even win. And we’ve all seen how that turned out for America.