During his 2016 presidential campaign, Trump already advertised his extreme dissatisfaction with allies who took advantage of America’s free-trade fanaticism — regardless of huge trade deficits — to deny US exporters access to their own markets even as they flooded the country with cheap imports. Trump was equally unhappy with allies who were “free-riding” US military protection, while spending very little on their own defense: in many cases not even 2% of their GDPs.

Japan was squarely in the line of fire on both accounts. On economics, structural obstacles to US imports had persisted even after years of talks, while on defense Japan was not devoting even 1% of GDP to defense, with 2% a far-off fantasy.

At the time, I was under contract with Japan’s foreign ministry — not to lobby the US government or any such thing, but to help redefine the country’s national strategy. That was Abe’s own personal focus, and therefore I met him every time I went back to work in Tokyo. He himself told me how very worried he was about the possibility of a Trump victory, a worse problem for him than for other leaders.

Obama, after all, had already caused him needless problems, including sending Caroline Kennedy as his ambassador to Tokyo. That empty-headed celebrity degraded a post previously held by eminent ex-speakers of the House or Senate Majority leaders, who Japanese prime ministers could usefully consult. On top of that, Kennedy took it upon herself to publicly criticize Abe for visiting the nationalistic Yasukuni Shrine very dear to his core constituency, an unprecedented impertinence for an ambassador.

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It was in that fraught context that Abe decided to ignore all protocol rules, and brush aside both the foreign ministry’s traditional caution and indeed US law, to try to meet Trump as soon as possible after his surprise election. His aim? To explain — truthfully enough — that his own goal was to make Japan a much stronger ally for the United States: neatly pre-empting anti-Japan policies even before they were formulated by Trump’s “transition team”.

And so it was that, on the afternoon of 17 November 2016, Abe and his interpreter met with the President-elect in his family apartment in Trump Tower. Trump’s daughter Ivanka was present, as was his son-in-law Jared Kushner — but as they all sat comfortably on sofas, there were no officials or note-takers in sight.

That not only ensured a relaxed atmosphere, but also provided legal protection against the US Logan Act which prohibits private US citizens, including Trump before his inauguration, from negotiating with foreign governments.

As it happens, Abe liked Trump, and vice versa, and each believed the other’s assurances that they would step in whenever officials allowed disagreements to get out of hand. In fact, over the years that followed there were no US-Japan quarrels, and more immediately word got back from Tokyo that Abe thought Trump very reasonable — and a better negotiating partner than the studiously reserved Obama.

This feedback persuaded Trump that he could ignore State Department reservations, just as Abe had ignored his famously over-cautious foreign ministry, and bargain face-to-face with foreign counterparts, just as he had countless times before as a real-estate magnate.

In addition to less memorable encounters, Trump’s personal diplomacy in his first time culminated in the unprecedented June 2019 encounter with North Korea’s Kim Jong Un. They met right on the DMZ, which Kim actually invited Trump to cross, making him the only US official to ever have stepped on North Korea’s soil. Some televised cordiality ensued while the TV cameramen had a bit of a rugby scuffle.

In the aftermath, in an astonishing display of collective amnesia, Trump’s critics kept saying that the Trump-Kim meeting had achieved nothing, because the DPRK had refused to give up its nuclear weapons. Yet that ignored how things had been before: with an alarming build-up of threats against South Korea, which Trump defused by his meeting with Kim.

Now, Trump is once again traveling in Asia to defuse a rise in mutual threats. But though North Korea remains as quiet as ever — a continued testament to Trump’s adept diplomacy six years ago — the President faces a much bigger crisis: with Xi Jinping’s China.

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After mounting threats against Taiwan, and even a date-specific 2027 invasion plan, over recent months China has launched a broad campaign of geoeconomic escalation. One obvious example is Beijing’s politically deadly import boycott of US soybeans, whose exports to China went from 985-million bushels in 2024 to zero so far in 2025. The US, for its part, has revoked the small-package tariff exemption, once set at $200 but more recently at $600, which allowed a tsunami of Chinese clothing and gadget postal-order imports at extremely low prices, which drove many remaining US small manufacturers out of business.

This escalation culminated in last week’s Chinese attempt to limit the US products that can be made with imported Chinese-refined rare earths. This is an unprecedented intrusion, and one which incidentally exposed years of policy paralysis. The fact is that “rare earths” are not all that rare; they only seem so because unreasonable environmental restrictions virtually prohibit processing in the US.

Either way, ahead of his vital meeting with Xi on Thursday, Trump has prepared in the usual way — buttering up his Chinese counterpart with unreciprocated praise and fulsome compliments. Yet he is also loaded for bear with the tariffs America has already imposed, which really weigh heavily on the Chinese economy, whose years of ultra-rapid growth are but a fading memory.

The Chinese middle classes that invested their savings in apartments for rental — because bank deposits earned virtually nothing, while the stock market mostly lost money for investors — must now rent them for very little — with huge numbers unrented impoverishing their owners. Unfortunately for them, far too many housing blocks were built before the construction companies themselves finally collapsed.

Meanwhile, China’s huge investment in railways and roads has also slowed: too many high-speed trains were traveling empty. That means that the parents of many poorly educated youngsters, who can no longer find construction jobs, must support them instead. As for their well-educated compatriots, they can no longer expect to immediately find a good job in the cities—in huge numbers, they are living in basements on menial gig-economy jobs. In short, China is overbuilt and over-supplied for a rapidly aging and falling population, and needs access to the insatiable American consumer to have any real growth.

Having imposed tariffs unilaterally — simply because he is not paralyzed by free-trade dogma — Trump can now reduce them in exchange for Chinese concessions. That includes a return to soybean imports, with farmers an important pillar of the MAGA coalition, and a toning down of truculent threats to invade Taiwan. On the other hand, Trump knows that he cannot ask the Chinese to stop supporting the Russian war in Ukraine.

As for Japan, Sanae Takaichi, its new prime minister, promises to end the post-Abe decline in US-Japan policy cooperation. Under Abe, a minimum of communications between officials in Tokyo and Washington was quite enough to ensure that both countries coordinated smoothly, for example to sustain the Philippines and other weaker countries threatened by China.

After Trump left office in 2021, and after Abe himself was murdered, everything had to be negotiated point by point. Abe’s successors hesitated to act as decisively as he did, meaning significant initiatives just petered out. Fortunately for Trump, Takaichi, the motorcycle rider, martial artist, and anti-immigration Right-winger, was very much Abe’s disciple.

And, certainly, their meeting seems to have been a success. Takaichi gifted Trump a golf putter that once belonged to Abe, while the pair signed a rare-earth minerals deal and reiterated tariffs agreement negotiated earlier in the year. But for their relationship to thrive over the longer term, Takaichi must herself do what Trump’s Argentine protege just managed to do very successfully: win a parliamentary election to gain more seats for her party, allowing her to rule without frail coalition partners.

So far, at any rate, Trump’s highly personalized diplomacy is again serving him well, though of course his meeting with Xi Jinping will be the biggest test of all. That Xi has just locked up top generals he had himself appointed means that there are cracks in his regime on top of the stalled economy, while Trump faces relentless opposition at home — so both men will try to be tough poker players, in spite of some weak cards.

For Shigeru Ishiba, the incumbent Prime Minister, this is clearly a humiliation. In truth, though, the world’s media seem most interested in another politician. With his sharp tongue and provocative charisma, Sohei Kamiya is already being likened to a Japanese Trump. Certainly, his Sanseito party’s “Japanese First” slogan is clearly based on the MAGA rallying cry of “America First”, even as Kamiya’s anti-immigrant sentiment echoes populists from Italy to Ireland.

As a result, Kamiya’s star is rising, with some pre-election polls placing his populists in third place, the party ultimately won just 14 seats. That’s an impressive victory for sure. But Sanseito is just one piece of the opposition pie, one encompassing several parties and 112 other seats. That includes everyone from the center-right Democratic Party to the Communists, each against the LDP — but each with very different ideas on Japan’s future.

“Do you have no party to vote for? Then we were born for you.” That is the tagline on Sanseito’s English language website — a howl of rage against Japan’s political establishment. Believing that the establishment Liberal Democratic Party is both politically ineffective and insufficiently conservative, it’s rooted in traditional values like family and national pride.

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This is particularly evident in Sanseito’s anti-immigration rhetoric, with Kamiya alleging that foreigners are being prioritized for welfare benefits, despite providing little evidence to support his claim. Yet just like the Farages of the world, who often tone down their words after some time has passed, Kamiya later admitted that Sanseito “has never called to drive out foreigners” and that “Japanese First” was less an actual policy than a nifty campaign slogan.

Besides, Sanseito’s rise among a subset of Japanese voters comes not because Kamiya’s ideas are popular — but because he’s been able to attract an electorate desperate for alternatives to the LDP. Prime Minister Ishiba, though hailing from the same party, is a completely different leader to the more domestically popular and internationally respected Shinzo Abe. Shockingly assassinated in 2022, the late Abe was certainly divisive. Yet he carried a sense of focused leadership that the current administration simply lacks.

The LDP’s current predicament is a mess of its own making. A slush fund scandal has rocked the party over the last few years, raising questions around the role of money in Japanese politics. It’s unclear what part Abe himself played in these events, but the dead are mercifully silent. Still, it was Abe’s political faction that was directly incriminated in the scandal, and it is now completely disbanded.

Prime Ministers Yoshihide Suga and Fumio Kishida both failed to regain public confidence in the LDP. Kishida attempted to address the scandal by sacking officials and dissolving his own implicated faction, but the public was not satisfied. The result was Kishida’s resignation, the end of LDP-Komeito’s majority in Japan’s lower house, with the ruling coalition now losing their hold of the Diet.

As a political outsider unrelated to the scandal, at any rate, the hapless Ishiba has inherited a Japan tired of LDP failure. Even so, it’d be wrong to see Kamiya as the Trump to Ishiba’s Hillary. For if Japanese populism may initially seem analogous to its Western counterparts, this is an entirely different political landscape. Sanseito’s pie-in-the-sky proposals — notably providing 100,000 yen (about $690) to families for every child they have — are closer to Corbynite social welfare. Kamiya’s push for AI and automation would be anathema to Rust Belt voters, but they make a bit more sense given Japan’s collapsing population.

In fact, it’s because of Japan’s notoriously low birthrate — actually not that far off other first-world countries — that jobs are becoming hard to fill. Representing about 3% of the population, foreigners can today be found in low-paying jobs such as manual labor. Yet there still aren’t enough of them to “steal” jobs from anyone. There are certainly more foreigners in Japan now than 20 years ago, but the numbers pale compared to the mass-migration seen in Europe. Approximately 357,000 foreigners arrived in Japan last year, a sharp contrast to the 1.2 million who migrated to the UK over the same period.

Illegal immigration? It’s actually on the decline in Japan. There are about 70,000 illegal immigrants in Japan out of an overall population of 123 million. America, for its part, has roughly 11 million illegals versus a population of 347 million. Proportionally, then, Japan is nowhere near close. According to a 2025 report from the Right-leaning Sankei Shimbun newspaper, the number of illegal overstayers in Japan is significantly down from the 1993 high of around 290,000, fluctuating between 60,000 and 80,000 since then. Because Japan has a tighter lid on illegal immigration compared to Western countries, it should come as no surprise that more quotidian issues, like the cost of living crisis, were far bigger concerns.

Over recent months, social media has highlighted the bad behavior stemming from overtourism, such as littering, noise pollution, and treating sacred Shinto sites like a playground. The government is doing its best to address these problems, but that’s little comfort for the locals who live nearby. It’s important to remember, however, that the troublemakers are tourists rather than immigrants. Studies suggest that crime rates among foreigners living in Japan are about the same, or even lower, than for the Japanese themselves.

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What, then, comes next for Sanseito? To begin with, don’t count on the party being around forever. While their triumph this time was notable, grassroots political parties tend to have a short shelf life in Japan: due to infighting, scandals, and poor leadership. Most of Sanseito’s newly-elected candidates have little to no political experience, while their idealism will eventually rub up against other opposition parties and the LDP itself, which is still a force to be reckoned with.

Yet even if Sanseito eventually dissolves, the establishment cannot ignore the grievances of its voters. As the past decade has shown, populist movements thrive when the “left behind” rise up. What happened last week is only the start of the LDP losing its grip on power — if, anyway, it refuses to change course. Stagnant wages, rising inflation, a weak yen, and Ishiba’s failed tariff negotiations with Trump — all these have left voters frustrated.

If things continue to worsen, then, the LDP is likely to expel Ishiba and find an alternative. A new leader is no guarantee of success, but Shinzo Abe’s heir apparent Sanae Takaichi has stated her intention to run for the party’s leadership. Much of her worldview, from economics to foreign policy aligns with Abe’s, which would potentially allow her to steer the LDP back towards what allowed it to stay in power for so long. Like the late prime minister, Takaichi is a dedicated nationalist, and supports Abenomics stalwarts like fiscal stimulus. More controversially, she is also dedicated to pushing for constitutional reform which would greatly expand Japan’s military powers — something Abe himself ultimately failed to do.

Then again, the LDP still has a serious image problem, not least with the slush fund scandal fresh in the nation’s mind. Should the opposition form a coalition powerful enough to become the ruling bloc, we may see a repeat of 2010 to 2012, when the LDP was out of power. Despite this setback, it eventually returned under the rebranded leadership of Shinzo Abe. Sanseito, in short, may enjoy some influence for a time — but will need more than slogans to stay relevant.

The apparent motivation for the crime was quickly revealed: a grievance held by the assassin against the Abe dynasty for promoting a religious group, the Unification Church — better known as the “Moonies”. He alleged the group had pressured his mother into making huge donations — around $1 million — leaving the family “devastated”. Revulsion at the murder was quickly followed by intense curiosity as a spotlight was placed on the murky relationship between Japan’s political class, especially its eternal party of government the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), and what are referred to as the new or upstart religions, or less politely, as cults.

Followers of the Unification Church would dispute the latter designation, but it is certainly a controversial organisation with a track record of illegality. The founder Sun Myung Moon, a close friend of Abe’s grandfather — the former PM Nobusuke Kishi — served time for fraud in the USA, and the group’s fundraising activities in Japan, conducted under the alleged protection of the LDP, provoked a group of 300 lawyers to set up an association to help people who claimed to have been coerced. It is alleged that agents of the Unification Church would scan the obituary columns, then target the grieving with emotionally manipulative appeals. The bereaved would be told that their recently deceased relatives needed assistance to reach heaven, which could be arranged, in return for sizeable and ongoing bequests. In 2020, a court in Tokyo ordered the church to repay $34,000 obtained through such methods.

Despite its occasional setbacks, the success of the Unification Church in Japan has been exceptional: it is believed to have raised 70% of its income in the country. But it is far from unique. Japan has proved to be fertile ground for a wide variety of pseudo (or nouveaux) religious groupings, and there are an estimated 180,000, or one for every 700 people in Japan. Many are innocuous, but the more controversial are characterised, according to a study by Inoue Nobutaka, by extreme levels of secrecy, erratic growth, and coercive proselytising.

This trend can be traced to the 1860s, a period of great social upheaval where centuries-old rules and customs were rapidly supplanted by a flood of new ideas and outside influences. The severing of the syncretic ties of Shinto and Buddhism and the lifting of the 250-year-old ban on Christianity in 1873 created space for a proliferation of new faiths. These were initially persecuted by the Right-wing militarists that ruled Japan, who subscribed to the official state religion of Shinto. But after the Second World War, which put an end to emperor worship and saw freedom of religion enshrined in the new US-imposed constitution, a spiritual vacuum emerged. As did, for the unscrupulous, a distinctly attractive tax-free business opportunity.

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Customers, or converts, were not hard to find as post-war Japan struggled to rebuild. Cities were flooded with young people from the countryside, who were poor, lonely, and often desperate. The migrants sought not just employment, but spiritual succour and a sense of belonging — the new religions offered both. In Tokyo especially, where the pace of life and the stifling rules of etiquette made making friends a great challenge, the allure of the welcoming new religions was palpable. (Even today, neighbours often don’t speak to each other, knowing one “hello” obliges them to repeat the greeting forever.)

Of those that flourished, some religions sought power and security through politics. The most famous of these is Soka Gakkai, a form of Nichiren Buddhism based on the teachings of a 13th century priest. It now claims eight million followers in Japan and twelve million worldwide. It has its own political party, Komeito, which thanks to the rigid discipline of its members — who vote as they are instructed — has become a key player in Japanese politics, often as a coalition partner for hire.

Komeito has been in alliance with the ruling LDP since 1999 and is the junior coalition partner of the present government. Michael Cucek of Temple University in Tokyo calls Komeito “the most important and least understood part of Japanese politics”. He says that the party is essentially run by women, with the most powerful part being its decision-making inner sanctum the Fujimbu, or mothers and women’s association. The political alliance is controversial within the LDP, but Cucek explains that as 25% of the party’s district votes are believed to be supplied by Komeito — in return, naturally, for favours — the awkward embrace looks likely to endure.

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It is tempting to compare the relationship between the two parties to that which the LDP’s senior politicians once maintained with the yakuza — Japan’s organised crime gangs — in the turbulent early Sixties. Kishi maintained a close relation with the mob boss Yoshio Kodama, whose assistance in supplying muscle he called on from time to time. Whether the fixers wear the sharp suits and Hawaiian shirts of the gangsters, or the flowing robes of religious leaders, makes little difference to the outcomes: they get things done.

At the other end of the spectrum are the apocalyptic cults, the most notorious of which was Aum Shinrikyo, founded by Matsumoto Chizuo, the half-blind son of a tatami mat maker. Aum promised psychic powers and salvation from a forecast Armageddon — a prospect with far more resonance in a country regularly struck by natural and man-made disasters. Aum drew on their leader’s charisma and unbounded self-belief: he persuaded followers he could fly and sold a panacea (actually orange peel in water) for $7,000 a shot to hoodwink followers into signing over their assets.

The group offered a form of spiritual cleansing for those who had become disgusted by the moral rot and emptiness that seemed to characterise Japanese society in the Seventies, when Prime Minister Tanaka Kakuei (known as Japan’s version of Richard Nixon) was embroiled in a bribery scandal and tainted by association with Yoshio Kodama, and Eighties, when Japan’s bubble economy ushered in an era of decadence and greed. Acolytes tended to be professionals, who were not just cynical about the decline of Japanese ethics but had been numbed into a fatalistic credulous passivity by the banality of corporate life.

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Aum was responsible for the world’s only WMD terrorist attack by a private organisation when they released sarin gas onto the Tokyo subway in 1995, killing 13 and injuring 6000. The leader was executed, but astonishingly the group survives, having changed its name to Aleph and lowered its profile. It is rumored to have 1600 members and has been in the news recently for refusing to cooperate with government surveillance orders.

The subway attack has become Japan’s signature cult-inspired atrocity, the one everyone knows about. But it is not an isolated incident: in 1986, seven women, calling themselves the “brides of God” and members of the “Friends of the Truth Society”, immolated themselves on a beach in Wakayama.

No one knows for sure how many Japanese are cult members today, but a figure of 10-20% has been estimated. The fundamental problem, one Japan expert tells me, is that “Japan has no real religion”. Traditional Buddhism is more of a philosophical and lifestyle creed and Shinto is mainly concerned with aesthetics, he explains. All of which makes the Japanese yearn for a more structured, accessible, transactional theology.

And once you recognise this yearning, you see evidence of it everywhere. It’s there in the mini-deities or spirits of the yuru-chara — mascot characters that represent everything from prefectures to companies to household goods. It’s there in the teen-pop idols, scarcely allowed to exist as real people, worshipped by devotees who will buy special tickets to shake their hands, or just sit in their presence. It’s there in the exclusive neighbourhood culture schools led by a revered “master” rewarded with discrete cash payments. And it’s there in the faux-religious rituals of tidying guru and Netflix star, Marie Kondo.

Japan is often questioned over its unsettled history, with the various legacies of the Second World War and its aftermath still a source of difficulty. But perhaps it is its unsettled spirituality, which lurks in the Japanese psyche, leading vulnerable and lonely people down dark pathways, that is the deeper, and more troubling issue.