So I got to a bus stop the other day and saw some political posters across the street that I hadn’t seen before. Here’s what I actually saw:

This actually taught me a new word! バラマキ apparently means “handout”, so the whole sentence there is “handouts are a tax increase”. Then to the left of that, it says “small government and cheap taxes”, oh joy.

Anyways, I went to look them up and they actually have an English platform written on their site. I guess you could call it an “interesting” read.

We intend to develop a unified spiritual foundation for the politics of Japan. This is our long-cherished hope. Unless the country has a spiritual foundation, it will become lost, and its citizens fall into an abyss of unhappiness.

Honestly, I got whiplash reading this - the poster’s message is all about reducing tax burdens, but in their “our philosophy” page and “party platform” page, they go on and on about religion and spiritual woo shit. As a matter of fact, one of their policies is to remove the barrier between church and state and revive shintoism I think. Honestly their own language and goals are a little confused here and I think it’s more a smokescreen for the actual goal of just reducing taxes and social welfare.

Also, I just took this as all code for “Japanese purity” or anti-immigrant rhetoric. What’s interesting though is they’re a bit more nuanced in this regard, according to Wikipedia anyway:

According to its manifesto, the group’s goal is to more than double Japan’s population to 300 million through making child-rearing easier for mothers and accepting foreigners as workforce.

Lmfao ok, more birthrate obsession, cool, but then the part about foreigners - I take this to mean accepting them as labor and nothing more, which is kinda the current status quo.

Not making this a whole effort post, so I’ll add this bit from the Wikipedia page:

The group identifies itself as “conservative” and is generally considered a right-wing, or a radical right party. The party advocates a nuclear deterrent for Japan, denies that the Nanjing Massacre occurred and has called for China to be expelled from the United Nations Security Council. The party has formed links to the American right, having attended the Conservative Political Action Conference in 2012, and bringing with them members of the Tokyo Tea Party, supporting low tax

Great, yet another right wing party. What made finding this poster funnier was that it was flanked on both sides by several sanseitou posters lol.

Idk why I’m posting about it, just more proof of how right wing this country is I guess