A Strange Coincidence
Sanseitō has been consistently lukewarm on climate action. Skepticism toward international decarbonization frameworks, hostility toward mega-solar projects, reservations about CO2 as the primary driver of warming — on this front, the party wears the same face as climate skeptics anywhere else in the world.
And yet the same party also speaks of “protecting Japan’s blessed natural environment and ecosystems.” Climate change, a planetary crisis, is treated with something close to denial, while the nature of this one country is spoken of with real warmth. How should we make sense of that gap?
The hint comes from an unexpected place: the “far-right ecology” that the French New Right, and Alain de Benoist in particular, worked into a system. They too remained skeptical of climate action itself while speaking passionately of “native nature” and “rooted land.” Built on three pillars — ethnicity, land, and nature — this thought frames cultural diversity through the analogy of biodiversity, and calls borders “the environment’s best friend.” It is a doctrine that repurposes ecological vocabulary as armor for ethnopluralism.
Reading Sanseitō’s discourse as a Japanese version of this Benoistian system seems, at first glance, coherent. But I want to hold back here.
Was It an Idea That Was Imported, or Just a Rhetoric?
Benoist’s far-right ecology has a clear intellectual genealogy. It absorbed the Conservative Revolution of Weimar Germany, North American deep ecology, bioregionalism, neo-paganism — and was worked, over decades, into something resembling a theory. Behind it lies an ontological question — why modern rationalism stripped nature of its sacredness — and a claim, however tendentious, that cultural difference ought to be protected by the same logic as ecological difference.
Does Sanseitō’s discourse have anything like that system behind it? Probably not.
What lies behind the phrase “protecting Japan’s blessed natural environment” looks less like a theoretical repurposing of ethnopluralism than a simple tautology: it’s Japan’s nature, so the Japanese protect it. This reads less like ecological thought than like nationalist sentiment borrowing the vocabulary of nature.
In other words, Sanseitō’s environmental discourse may not be an “import” of Benoistian far-right ecology at all, but a reprise of a different lineage that Japanese conservatism has long possessed — satoyama, the “land of abundant rice,” the phrase “mountains purple, waters clear.” The surface resembles it. The roots grow somewhere else.
Why Doesn’t Japanese Conservatism Need a Theory?
The question worth asking here isn’t how to connect Sanseitō’s intellectual lineage to a foreign theory, but rather the reverse: why does nothing like Benoist’s systematization show up in Japanese conservative discourse at all?
The French New Right needed theoretical armament because they had to fight as a minority in the public sphere. They seized Gramsci’s concept of cultural hegemony from the left and had to build arguments capable of engaging intellectuals. Theory, for them, was a weapon for a losing position to seize control of discourse.
Japanese conservatism, by contrast, can rely on the “air” (kūki) of the majority. Phrases like “Japan’s nature” or “the land of abundant rice” don’t function as propositions requiring proof — they function as premises already assumed to be shared. This is precisely the structure Roland Barthes analyzed as myth: a semiotic operation that makes something historically constructed appear natural and self-evident. The discourse of “protecting Japan’s nature” behaves mythically in exactly this sense. Its power comes precisely from never being asked to justify itself.
A Resemblance to the “Imposed Constitution” and Imperial Succession Debates
This structure strikingly resembles two things I’ve written about before: the “imposed constitution” thesis and the discourse around imperial succession. The imposed-constitution argument, too, rested less on rigorous international law than on an emotional self-evidence — “it has no legitimacy because the Japanese didn’t write it.” Much of the imperial succession discourse leans on what Eric Hobsbawm called “invented tradition” — a modern construction dressed up as something ancient and natural.
What all of these share, regardless of the object, is a single pattern: substituting something that should be argued for a position that requires no argument, the position of self-evidence. There isn’t even the rigidity of what I’ve called “control thinking” here. Control requires naming its object as an object and pinning it down with logic — but much of Japanese conservatism settles, short of that, into “that’s just how it is.”
The Absence of Theory Is Itself the Thing to Analyze
So the attempt to understand Sanseitō’s environmental discourse as a “Japanese version of far-right ecology” is half right and half missing the point. There is indeed a structural resemblance: skepticism toward climate action paired with talk of native nature. But if you go looking for a Benoistian theoretical system behind it, you’re searching for something that isn’t there — and coming up empty.
What matters is the meaning of the presence or absence of theory itself. The French New Right needed theory as a minority. Japanese conservatism didn’t need it, as a majority. This asymmetry explains both the “strange coincidence” and the “decisive difference” between the two environmental discourses at once.
And this asymmetry isn’t confined to environmental discourse. It holds for the constitution, for imperial succession, and for Japan’s nature alike. The imposed-constitution thesis is not a conclusion reached after painstaking examination of the drafting process or of attribution under international law. Much of the imperial succession discourse is not the product of verification grounded in historical sources tracing the actual development of imperial institutions. And Sanseitō’s phrase “protecting Japan’s nature” is not a theory grounded in ecological data or comparative international environmental policy.
What these share is that none of them rests on solid historical verification, scientific evidence, or theoretical grounding — none reflects deep understanding. They are, instead, sentimental, emotional, and in a sense shallow discourses. That, I think, is the true nature of Japanese conservative discourse. It is sustained not by the weight of argument but by the weight of feeling. And that is precisely why it resists refutation so well — feeling has a stubbornness that data cannot dislodge.
Satoyama Is Not “Nature As It Is”
Here I want to enter one caveat, to avoid being misunderstood.
I don’t mean to dismiss every instance of “protecting native nature” as cut from the same cloth. Take the satoyama landscape, for instance. It is not untouched wilderness. It is the result of generations of people gathering firewood, opening rice paddies, drawing water, and tending coppice woodland — a landscape produced by an ongoing relationship between people and land. Satoyama is, in a sense, the accumulated history of a dialogue — a response — between humans and land.
Toward the desire to carry forward what has been handed down across generations in this way, I do feel a genuine sympathy. This is closer to what I’d call response-thinking than control-thinking. It treats land not as an object to be unilaterally dominated and used, but as the accumulation of a long conversation carried on between people and nature.
But Sanseitō’s phrase “protecting Japan’s nature” strikes a different note, I think. What’s there isn’t a gaze fixed on the concrete relationships accumulated between people and land, but a claim of ownership and boundary carried entirely by the single word “Japan’s.” Where the work of protecting satoyama begins from specific land, specific people, named relationships, Sanseitō’s discourse skips that specificity altogether and encloses nature at the abstract level of “Japan” from the outset. If the former is an accumulation of response, the latter is, from the start, a gesture of control.
The same words — “protecting nature” — can carry entirely different substance depending on who says them. Not mistaking one for the other seems, to me, to matter quite a bit.
Words That Circulate Without Ever Being Argued For
What we should pause over in the phrase “protecting Japan’s nature” isn’t whether the claim is right or wrong. It’s the single fact that this phrase manages to circulate without ever once being asked to justify itself.
And there’s one more thing that shouldn’t be overlooked: the considerable number of people who, faced with words like these, applaud emotionally without thinking anything through for themselves — who get swept up, or reflexively tap “like” on social media. A discourse that is never asked to argue for itself doesn’t circulate only because of the skill of those who speak it; it also circulates because those who receive it have already given up the effort of verification. For a myth to go on functioning as myth, it needs not only someone to carry it, but an audience that asks no questions. Theory-less traditionalism may be just another name for the complicity between the one who speaks and the one who, asking nothing, cheers.
This essay takes as its point of departure Saki Morino’s article on the far-right ecology systematized by the French New Right — the piece that traces why parties such as Sanseitō combine climate skepticism with talk of protecting native nature — and departs from it to examine what is specific to Japanese conservative discourse. For the theoretical genealogy of far-right ecology itself, readers should consult that original article.
Saki Morino, born in Tokyo in 1996, studied at Waseda University before moving to France; she is currently a graduate student in philosophy at Université Paris 8, specializing in contemporary French philosophy, and writes a serialized column on the far right and feminism for the magazine Femin.