I'm pleased to announce that I've joined the new editorial board for Tokyo Review. I will be reaching out to promising new writers soon, as well as contribute my own research and opinions on a regular basis.

I wrote a shorter, slightly punchier version of my recent research article about Sanseitō as my first contribution to the new Tokyo Review. It should be vastly more accessible, and hopefully sets the tone of what else I plan to do in the future of TR www.tokyoreview.net/2025/11/what...

Important piece by Heidi Ka-Sin Lee about Itō Shiori’s recent documentary Black Box Diaries. I have more to add to this story myself at some point because Itō’s assaulter, Yamaguchi Noriyuki, is frequently invited on Sanseitō and Kamiya Sōhei’s YouTube channel. www.tokyoreview.net/2025/11/movi...

Worth translating: interview w/ @valentimvicente.bsky.social on a very plausible explanation for the rise of the radical right in Europe: Norms that made voting far-right parties socially undesirable have eroded - and the availability of far-right parties met a certain "demand" that already existed

I wrote a shorter, slightly punchier version of my recent research article about Sanseitō as my first contribution to the new Tokyo Review. It should be vastly more accessible, and hopefully sets the tone of what else I plan to do in the future of TR www.tokyoreview.net/2025/11/what...

My latest piece for Tokyo Review:

Important piece by Heidi Ka-Sin Lee about Itō Shiori’s recent documentary Black Box Diaries. I have more to add to this story myself at some point because Itō’s assaulter, Yamaguchi Noriyuki, is frequently invited on Sanseitō and Kamiya Sōhei’s YouTube channel. www.tokyoreview.net/2025/11/movi...

A bittersweet announcement this morning: Rob Fahey and I have handed off editorship of Tokyo Review to a new editing team. We had, frankly, become negligent of a project that needed to thrive, so we've passed it on to four new editors who we're very confident are going to take good care of it:

How does a fringe, anti-vaccine party come to influence national politics? In this insightful article, Romeo Marcantuoni and Robert A. Fahey examine Sanseitō, a Japanese political party founded during the pandemic. www.cambridge.org/core/journal... #Japan #Politics #ConspiracyTheories #APJJF

A very informative article explaining the conspiracy theories and ideologies motivating Japan's new far-right party, Sanseitō, which made substantial seat gains in last July's upper house election. Thanks to @rmarcantuoni.bsky.social & @robfahey.net for writing this.

Rintaro Nishimura offers a timely and vital analysis of the LDP's fragile, new alliance with Nippon Ishin no Kai. Will the partnership serve both parties equally, as the LDP-Komeito coalition once did? Or has it already started teetering on the edge?

In this film review, Heidi Ka-Sin Lee discusses "Black Box Diaries" by Itō Shiori, a pathbreaking documentary detailing the director's own civil case against her assaulter, but which has yet to be released in her home country.

I'm pleased to announce that I've joined the new editorial board for Tokyo Review. I will be reaching out to promising new writers soon, as well as contribute my own research and opinions on a regular basis.

@rmarcantuoni.bsky.social provides a summary of his recent research article on the far-right conspiracy party Sanseitō. Responding to the media's portrayal of the party as a catch-up moment for Japanese politics, he instead argues that its conspiracy ideology is a novel form of political action.

"If the United States hopes to rely on Japan as a pillar of the Indo-Pacific order, it must match Japan’s sense of urgency with sustained capacity, clarity of direction, and alignment of strategic intent", Jada Fraser writes in her analysis on the changing dynamics of the US-Japan security alliance.

Times are changing and so is Tokyo Review. We are excited to announce a fresh new team of editors!

Ten years ago, two municipalities in Tokyo wrote history by commencing Japan’s first so-called “partnership systems” to provide some level of recognition to LGBTQ+ couples’ relationships. In the years that followed, the policy has spread tremendously and paved the way for further change.

As a non-native speaker this has always confounded me because I’ve seen it mixed up all my life

I had this piece in the pipeline at Teen Vogue when the news dropped; I'm publishing it to my Substack because I think it's important and I don't want an interview with Adam Hochschild to go to waste. sufficienttotheday.substack.com/p/the-federa...

The narrative seems to be(come) that the Dutch election shows a “comeback of the political center”. We have seen this frame before, implying “the center” has an ideological substance and is stable. But “the center” keeps moving right on mostly nativist, but also often authoritarian, issues.

I'm trying to get a hang of Photoshop but the AI functions are throwing me off. Here's me trying to remove the BACKGROUND to an image. I get now that that's not what the button does, but there's little signaling that it will do what it does: transform the Diet into the Capitol Hill building

I don’t understand what’s happening. At all.

Well I’ll be damned

this hasn't really broken through to most people but the state of the games industry is *dire* right now.

For what it's worth, I think people should remember that her being on the right is not something people really think or know about in general.

I’m extremely bummed by some egregious typesetting errors in my recent article as a result of mistakes made by the production team. It seems like they did not use a Japanese font package for the final manuscripts, leading some kanji to be rendered as one of their Chinese alternatives.

Given the almost universal malaise of liberal democracies, it amazes me that people still think that the way out is institutional reform. Mainstream parties have failed in all systems and far-right parties have succeeded in all systems. More importantly, people are dissatisfied in all systems.

Bring back Bonzie Buddy

I think we really should stop using antifa and just fully say anti-fascist and get them saying they are against anti fascism. Using antifa is giving them some distance and I genuinely think some of their base don’t even know that’s what it stands for.

It's like "Romeo and Juliet" meets "West Side Story"

repost this if an editor has ever saved you from yourself

“Please look away Atreyu, I don’t want you to see me lock in”

Today I showed the designers that you can name cells in spreadsheets and use the names in formulas (i.e. "=PLAYER_LEVEL" instead of "=C12"). You can then use the Name Manager to track or rename them. I thought this was common knowledge, but I guess not, so sharing that tidbit here.

My main problem with this is not so much the dominance of quantitative methods in “top-20” journals but rather the dominance of the exclusive use of quantitative methods — in many cases causality could and should have been established by a (nested) qualitative study. *

Great paper on the state of political science osf.io/preprints/os... by @guygrossman.bsky.social et. al. We have become more diverse, more quantitative, and more collaborative.

Worth noting Prof. Curtis can still fill a room at LDP headquarters when he comes to Japan. He's well-connected in the party and has lots of friends in senior leadership, so I doubt he says any of this lightly or casually.

It’s kind of a fact of life that the LDP will collapse. Nothing lasts forever, and they have been on a downward slope in resources, members, and votes since the 70s.

Matteo Renzi 🇮🇹, Emmanuel Macron 🇫🇷 & Pieter Omtzigt 🇳🇱were all hailed as democratic saviors who would deliver a “post-populist” politics. In different ways, all three have done incredible damage to the politics in their countries, leaving the “populists” (= far right) even more entrenched.

My subway take: AI will actually be good because it’ll make the internet so useless that we will have to reset our relationship to it

The Takaichi win in specific but also the whole LDP presidential election in general is likely to put wind in the sails of Sanseitō, which has seen its economic and law-and-order messaging on immigration become a focal point. We can expect more parroting ultimately benefiting the far right

I wonder if to an extent the growing divide in men and women votes played into the surprise Takaichi win. In a recent NHK poll, more women showed support for the LDP than men, with men showing vastly more support for the right wing parties than women.

Unless Takaichi as LDP leader can show a side of herself that's never been apparent in her career to date, this is going to be a disaster. Lots of very glum faces among the senior LDP faces up on stage right now; they no doubt suspect that the turkeys just voted for Christmas.

As long as the far right shapes public opinion, and mainstream parties follow public opinion, the far right dominates politics, whether in government or not.

I was wondering who wrote this and was not disappointed to discover Naito-san, who apparently has an unlimited word count too.

LDP leadership campaign 2025 mascot

The article @robfahey.net and I wrote on Sanseito is finally out (open access). We describe the party’s conspiracy worldview and how it shapes its policies and organizational features. I may do a thread to include the work I have done since finalizing the draft. www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

I mostly agree with this, but more so: Any time spent on saying "they have incoherent politics" is probably better spent saying "what ideology, which policies, what social strategys have produced this violent nihilism, and what analogs do they have historically?"

As a Belgian, I'm shocked that this is news to me.