The Liberal Democratic Party will hold its leadership election on October 4 to choose Prime Minister Ishiba’s successor. Since the leader of the ruling party is normally chosen as prime minister in parliament, a new cabinet will almost certainly be formed soon after. Yet the darker shadow looming over Japanese politics today is not policy debate itself, but the rise of exclusionary rhetoric. A female candidate in the race illustrated this with her now-infamous "Nara deer" story. Citing the 万葉集(Manyosyu), she declared: "There are people who actually kick these deer, people who strike them to frighten them. If tourists from abroad come here only to harm what the Japanese people hold dear, surely something has gone too far."
However, when The Tokyo Shimbun fact-checked the matter with Nara Prefecture and relevant authorities, no evidence was found that the individual in the circulated video was foreign, nor were there any official records of deer being kicked or beaten by tourists. The recent rule changes to protect the animals were not prompted by repeated assaults, but by the need to supplement existing cultural property laws with preventive and educational measures. And in fact, the rare cases that resulted in convictions for killing or harming deer involved Japanese offenders, not foreigners. In short, this was not a matter of genuine evidence, but an instance where exclusionary sentiment was politically mobilized.
How should we understand such episodes? Wendy Brown’s In the Ruins of Neoliberalism offers a compelling lens. She argues that neoliberalism is not just an economic program—it has eroded the very language through which we speak of society. Even as inequality has widened, the conceptual ground for naming it social injustice has weakened. Everything is reframed as “individual responsibility” or “market outcome”. As the ideals of public good and equality have hollowed out, what has risen in their place are exclusive identities—tradition, family, nation—as the supposed glue of community. Into this vacuum, Brown suggests, populism and xenophobia inevitably flow.
Japan has followed a similar trajectory. Just as Thatcher in the UK and Reagan in the US advanced deregulation and privatization in the 1980s, Japan under Prime Minister Nakasone (1982–87) declared the “settlement of postwar politics” and pursued administrative reform and privatization. The era of the so-called “all middle class” disintegrated, and individuals were thrust into competition under the banner of self-responsibility. In this process, social solidarity and public welfare were steadily subordinated to market efficiency and the preservation of traditional values.
The result was that even as inequality deepened, the language to describe it as a “structural problem” fell away. Discontent, stripped of a social vocabulary, was redirected not toward markets or policies, but toward “outsiders”. In this sense, neoliberalism’s dismantling of “society” and its hollowing out of the ideals of equality and solidarity prepared the fertile ground for xenophobia. That the image of “a foreigner kicking a deer” can retain political power despite being untrue is possible only because this ground already exists.
Seen in this light, the rise of exclusionary politics in Japan is not merely the product of opportunistic politicians. It is the long-term consequence of a society reshaped by neoliberal logic since the 1980s. When liberalization and competition are promoted while the language of democracy and social justice retreats, the vacuum is filled by the emotional politics of an imagined foreign threat.
This is why merely denouncing xenophobia will never be enough. What we need is to restore a language of “society” itself—to recover ways of speaking that do not reduce inequality and discrimination to individual failings, but instead rebuild solidarity and public responsibility as the basis of living together. That challenge, more than any sound bite or scapegoat, is the task now placed before Japanese democracy.
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