Sanseitō is a fringe Japanese political party founded during the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic that has won several seats in the National Diet since 2022. Initially coming to prominence as a promoter of anti-vaccine narratives, the party has since promoted a conspiracist worldview that connects to more conventional right-wing nationalism and addresses a much broader range of issues and beliefs. In this article we outline the core tenets of this worldview and examine how attention to its construction as a participative political ideology sheds light on the party’s political actions and motivations.

This article investigates the popular social media channels of former Happiness Realization Party official Yukihisa Oikawa, who has built himself a profile as a media personality within the Japanese language conspiracy narrative realm. In our analysis, we put a particular focus on his statements concerning the Russo-Ukrainian war and examine them within the context of his larger ideological and political views. Using mixed quantitative and qualitative discourse analysis methods, we are able to trace radicalization and semantic shifts within his terminology, as well as investigate the connection between metapolitical communication strategies and the monetization of anti-media and conspiracist disinformation – a connection that is common for the political strategy of the global far-right.

There are two main ways Russian propaganda reaches Japan: (a) the social media accounts of official institutions, such as the Russian Embassy, or Russian state-linked media outlets, such as Sputnik, and (b) pro-Russian Japanese political actors who willingly (or unwillingly) spread disinformation and display a clear pro-Kremlin bias. These actors justify the Russian invasion of Ukraine and repeat the Russian view of the war with various objectives in mind, primarily serving their own interests. By utilizing corpus analysis and qualitative examination of social media data, this article explores how Russian propaganda and a pro-Russian stance are effectively connected with and incorporated into the discursive strategies of political actors of the Japanese Far-Right.