The minor opposition party Sanseito, which is projected to capture double-digit seats in the July 20 Upper House election, has muted some of its conspiracy theories.

However, the rising party, which champions a “Japanese First" policy, has continued to maintain other controversial stances.

Sanseito leader Sohei Kamiya won his Upper House seat in 2022, garnering 1.76 million votes in the proportional representation system. It was the first Diet seat for the party, which was founded two years earlier. 

During the election campaign, Kamiya called for the freedom not to wear masks and not to vaccinate amid the COVID-19 novel coronavirus pandemic.

“Sanseito Q&A book basic edition,” a pamphlet compiled by Kamiya shortly before the election, said: “Those forces that aim to make huge profits are actively calling for wearing masks to incite exaggerated fears of the coronavirus pandemic.”

“Those forces” were explained as “collectively referring to organizations centered around international financial capital affiliated with Jews.”

The party also campaigned for “education based on a self-respecting view of history” that makes the public care about their country, communities and traditions and for a law that makes it difficult for foreign capital to acquire companies and land.

In August 2023, about a year after the Upper House election, Kamiya, then the party’s number two, demanded that Sanseito leader Manabu Matsuda resign and succeeded him.

Matsuda, a former Lower House member who co-founded the party with Kamiya and three others, had labeled a COVID-19 vaccine a “lethal weapon.”

That year, many senior members left the party, including an individual who had insisted that wheat flour did not exist in Japan before World War II.

Speaking at the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Japan on July 3 this year, Kamiya said Sanseito stopped publishing “Sanseito Q&A book basic edition” after the Upper House election in 2022 because there were “problems” and revised its content.

A former municipal assembly member in Suita, Osaka Prefecture, Kamiya unsuccessfully ran for a Lower House seat in 2012 on the ticket of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party.

Kamiya opened his YouTube channel the following year and started “Ishiki Kaikaku Daigaku” (Consciousness reform university), a hybrid course of online and physical lectures, in 2018 to offer information he said was not available in schools or through the mass media.

The course covered a wide range of subjects, from histories of Japan and other countries to spiritual interests.

They included: “Knowing ‘hidden power’ that dominates this world,” “Revival of Japanese soul, Awakening of cosmic consciousness,” “Was Hitler really a great evil?” and “Meals and mindsets that please genes.”

A former Sanseito official said the course brought people together over the internet and connected them sideways, just like the party is rapidly expanding its support base now.

Currently, five Diet members and 151 local assembly members belong to Sanseito, which won three seats in the Tokyo metropolitan assembly election in June.

In the July 20 Upper House election, the party fielded candidates in all 45 electoral districts and also put up 10 in the proportional representation system.

The party is calling for stricter restrictions on the acceptance of foreign workers and education that can make the public proud of their country’s history and culture.

It opposes the dual-surname system to protect traditional family values and also says same-sex marriages could cause confusion in society.

Other campaign pledges include lower taxes and social security premiums.

The party’s proposed Constitution states that the emperor represents the country as head of state and that sovereign power resides with the nation, not the people.

In the draft, the party also called for stipulating “requirements for the people” in law, citing those “with a heart to value Japan” as the criteria.

Critics said the proposed Constitution is Sanseito’s attempt to drag Japan back to the prewar years.

Despite corrections of the party’s course, some of Kamiya’s arguments appear unchanged.

In a video released on his YouTube channel in May, Kamiya frequently used “deep state,” a phrase associated with an American conspiracy theory that society is controlled in secret by the privileged few in politics and business as well as the media.

“We must speak up, but many opponents come out if we say too much, so I have told party members that we should start from where we know,” he said.

“(To say how much) is a delicate issue. There is a deep state everywhere, such as in the media, the medical field, the agricultural field and Kasumigaseki (government ministries and agencies).”