Keir Starmer would be a much happier politician in Japan

Instead, he is lost in Britain.

Illustration by Oivind Hovland / Ikon Images

You’re mad, I was repeatedly told, to go to Japan in summer. The land of the rising sun burns hot in July. Online forums warned of the dangers of drowning in your own sweat, and the risks of being deafened by the din of cicadas in the trees. They weren’t wrong. But some Japan is better than no Japan, and if nothing else, it allows you to escape a far worse sound: the endless blare of the iPhone shutter from a thousand tourists trying to take that perfect shot of cherry blossom.

To be in Japan in the summer is to live a procession of dualities. Order and chaos. Stillness and noise. Heat and… well, more heat, really. To travel on the Shinkansen, the Japanese bullet train, is to experience a level of human engineering that quickens the pulse. But that quickening won’t come from the sound. It is shockingly quiet: not a blip from a phone, the murmur of conversation, or even the hum of an engine transporting you seamlessly along the spine of the country. The quiet comes with a procession of courtly train conductors, walking precisely through every carriage, only to turn and bow to the smattering of passengers in each. It is serene, but it’s a serenity quickly shattered as soon as you step on to the train platform – any train platform – where a wall of pitch and sound assaults every sense. Each Japanese station boasts its own jingle, played repeatedly. In public places, it is a country that seems to worry about even a moment’s repose. I watched a cleaner in Hiroshima station gamely pulling around his rubbish cart, which played a horrible jingle every time it moved. I sympathised, but he seemed completely unbothered.

There is one sphere of Japanese life that has resisted duality, and even eluded interest, for decades: politics. Or rather, it has resisted contestation, which is a peculiar place for a democratic polity to sit. The British Conservative Party likes to think it’s the most successful political party in the history of democracy. The Japanese Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) might have something to say about that. It has been in power for all but three years since 1955.

In the time since postwar reconstruction, Japanese politics has not been so much a battle between ideas or parties as an extended patronage network that flows through the LDP. Japanese politics has been fought over incremental change and advancement, where stability and consensus have been prized over flair or risk, and where the end goal is gradual progress, and politics is not about competing visions for how society ought to be. It is a politics that values internal harmony and technocratic, managerial leadership over rhetorical flourishes or ideological radicalism.

Remind you of anyone? Keir Starmer would fit in well with this political culture; this is partly why he is struggling in our own. It is often said that the Prime Minister is boring. In fact, he is the most fascinating aberration in British political terms since Thatcherism. Great leaders shape political culture but they also tend to swim with its current, not against it. British politicians are expected to offer vision – something Starmer and his aides are wary of, if not actively hostile towards. His government wants to show, not tell. But whether we like it or not, British politics is entrenched in a culture that expects leaders to offer direction. This has left Starmer unmoored, and less able to defend a perfectly creditable record. The space where he refuses to offer ideological direction is being filled by the radical right.

In any case, a Starmerite approach isn’t working for Japan or the LDP any more. For the first time in a long time, the hard right is showing signs of life in Japanese politics. Last month, a relatively new party “Sanseitō” (roughly translated as “the Party of Do-it-Yourself”) won a clutch of seats in the upper house, depriving the LDP of its majority. Its leader Sohei Kamiya, cites direct inspiration from Trump, promising to put “Japan first”. Its success feels familiar, speaking to voters’ discontent over wage stagnation, rising food (rice) prices and immigration (still extremely low by Western standards). Yet its success is also peculiarly Japanese, majoring on the problems of over-tourism, citing concern about the behaviour of foreigners, and raising the alarm over Japanese ethnic purity. The LDP now faces a familiar problem as Western centre-right parties: should it defend liberal values or move towards the agenda of those who decry them?

In a sense, then, Japan is catching up with our politics as we catch up with its economics. We’ve now had 15 years of stagnation. They’ve had 25. We are rapidly ageing, just like Japan. Our economy is becoming more indebted – just like theirs. Both Britain and Japan are having to pay for years of quantitative easing and loose monetary policy while remaining over-regulated and bureaucratic. Japanese society, meanwhile, has another duality: astonishing 20th-century infrastructure, and yet in many ways it’s digitally backward. Cash is still king, fax machines remain ubiquitous; everything feels weirdly Eighties.

Perhaps Britain, rudderless and under pressure from societies that are rapidly advancing in technological terms, will end up in the same place. Indeed, we’re probably already there: Britain as the 21st-century Japan, stuck in a rut. But with less good trains, and ruder conductors.

[See also: It’s time for angry left populism]