Visiting and experiencing Japan is a dream that over 40 million people fulfill each year, and millions more eagerly await their turn. Yet, in a country admired from all corners of the globe, a generation is growing up losing faith in it.
While we dream about Tokyo's metro, which runs with pinpoint accuracy, and a society where nobody litters, Japan's young generation dreams about a future that has a place for them. Where it doesn't, xenophobia, chauvinism, and mounting frustration creep in.
The globalization of Japan's cultural industry hit a point in 2026 where its influence on mainstream culture is practically undeniable. Its grip on the pulse of mainstream culture is now evident in virtually every cultural form. Anime, once seen as a subcultural phenomenon at the turn of the millennium, is now part of the global mainstream. It appears on celebs' profiles like Kim Kardashian, in Netflix's top categories, and in the aesthetics of current music.
The historical drama Shōgun fully capitalized on the hunger for the romanticization of Japan's history, snagging a record number of Emmy awards. The third-largest gaming industry on the planet, featuring recent title hits like Elden Ring or Ghost of Yōtei, hardly needs further elaboration.
A Vision of Lost Courtesy
Visiting Japan has never been as economically accessible as it is now, thanks mainly to the very weak yen in recent years. It's no surprise that 2025 was another record year for tourism, with over 40 million visitors to Japan. Our fascination with Japan always reflected the anxieties we carry from our own societies and whose antidote seems to be hidden somewhere in Tokyo's winding alleys or at the base of Mount Fuji.
Romantic visions of lost courtesy, empathy, and order mix with exciting technological dreams and intelligent urban solutions. But these romantic visions have always overshadowed real and deep problems that Japanese society suffers from, whose consequences we can currently see in Japanese politics.
Perhaps the most visible is the sharp rise in popularity of the ultra-conservative political movement Sanseitō, often associated with xenophobic rhetoric (also known as the DIY party). Its leader, Sohei Kamiya, dubbed the "Japanese mini Trump," recently suggested a 5% limit on the ratio of immigrants in society, who would then be expelled at an older age.
The party that grew on COVID conspiracy theories now spreads a range of lies from a xenophobic and chauvinistic playbook that was widely circulated among European politicians during the 2015 migration crisis. We can observe a similar pattern when analyzing the political slogans of the MAGA movement, which heavily inspires Sanseitō.
Populism, Japanese Style
Especially chilling is the support this movement has among the young, particularly in online environments like TikTok or YouTube. Sanseitō's channel has 496,000 subscribers, three times more than the ruling Liberal Democratic Party. According to NHK surveys, Sanseitō is most popular among voters aged 18–39, with men favoring them more than women. In elections, it even snagged 20% of the youngest voters aged 18–19, aka Gen Z. Yasuo Takao from Curtin University explains that this support mainly grew from utter intergenerational economic disillusionment.
Young Japanese, unlike their parents' generation, who could still benefit from Japan's economic miracle, are now facing the bleak reality of a stagnant market. This is illustrated by the record-high "curry rice index," a folksy barometer of inflation and the purchasing power of Japanese households.
"A lot of Gen Z saw their parents sacrifice their lives for the company, work countless overtime hours, and basically give up their private lives," says Sumie Kawakami, a social sciences lecturer at Yamanashi Gakuin University, adding, "In the past, employers offered decent salaries and benefits to keep people at the company until retirement. But that’s not true anymore—companies are cutting costs, not everyone has full-time jobs, and salaries with bonuses are no longer as generous as before."
A Generation Without Growth
In 2024, Japan experienced its highest wage growth in more than three decades. However, inflation outweighed these gains. An entire generation of Japanese workers has never witnessed real wage growth—until now, when inflation swallowed it anyway.
Even worse is the so-called income wall, a structural barrier to secondary incomes in households. In reality, it looks like this: when an educated woman returns to work after maternity leave and gets a higher hourly wage, she must reduce her working hours to keep the household's tax benefits. An all-too-familiar trope is the demographic crisis. In 1975, 7.7 workers supported one retiree.
By 2025, it's just 1.9 workers per retiree. The young pay ever higher taxes and social insurance contributions but doubt the same level of security will be available to them—projections show pensions could fall by up to 30%. The Bank of Japan warns that the aging population is already adversely affecting economic growth: between 1990 and 2022, real GDP grew at only 0.8% annually, the second lowest in the G7, while the working-age population declined by 0.46% annually.
Housing as a Luxury
Similarly depressing is the housing situation, something many young people in the Czech Republic can relate to. The numbers are brutal: an apartment in central Tokyo now has a median price of over 89 million yen, with average prices in the most desirable districts exceeding 110 million yen, while the average annual salary in Japan is roughly 4.8 million yen. Even in Tokyo, where households earn more, owning an apartment is an unattainable dream. Apartment prices in the capital surged by 64% over the past four years, a pace far outstripping wage and rent growth.
Remember these numbers when you see popular videos about renovating abandoned Japanese countryside homes (akiya), while young city dwellers can't afford housing. Tokyo's metropolitan government acknowledges the crisis so much that in 2025, it approved the first extensive affordable housing program, creating a public-private fund worth 20 billion yen to rent apartments at 80% of the market rent. This is a huge shift in a country that has relied on market solutions for decades.
And so the circle we drew closes. We've envisioned Japan for decades as a society with brilliant solutions. Yet these images have prevented us from seeing what was accumulating beneath—a generation born into economic stagnation and social conservatism. The fact that this generation increasingly finds answers in populism and xenophobia isn’t a Japanese anomaly. It's a consequence we intimately recognize, only we're used to looking for it elsewhere. Maybe it's time to stop watching Japan as an aesthetic object and start seeing it as a warning.
