Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

Japanese party politics is oversaturated with actors declaring themselves "conservative" to counter a lack of hope among the populace. Drawing on research on politics and time, I investigate how specific temporal registers create or inhibit affective investment in political futures.

Paper long abstract

In a 2024 Gekkan Nihon interview, former Prime Minister Ishiba Shigeru and philosopher Nakajima Takeshi observed that contemporary Japanese party politics is oversaturated with actors proclaiming themselves to be "conservative." Across the political spectrum—from Reiwa Shinsengumi on the left to Sanseitō on the right—parties compete to position themselves as guardians of "true conservatism." These competing claims mobilise strikingly divergent nostalgic engagements with the past: the Constitutional Democratic Party of Japan (CDPJ) valorises pre-Meiji egalitarian religious syncretism, while the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) appeals to immediate postwar individual self-sufficiency as the essence of Japanese character. This pervasive emphasis on the past and “conservation” suggests a reductive engagement with the future, potentially foreclosing any robust imagination of utopia. Such temporal dynamics take on particular significance given recent scholarship documenting a widespread lack of hope in Japan, especially among younger generations—a phenomenon linked to political disengagement, high levels of distrust, and anti-establishment sentiment (Buchmeier and Vogt 2023; Krauss et al. 2017; Weatherall, Huang, and Whang 2018).

Drawing on post-foundational discourse theory (Marchart 2010; Marttila 2015) and emerging research on politics and time (Caballe 2024; Knott 2024), this paper examines how contemporary political actors who self-identify as "conservative" construct temporal registers—interrelated discursive articulations around signifiers of the past, present, and future—and how these constructions shape or inhibit affective investments in political futures. In doing so, the paper grapples with the following questions: Why do these politics of time generate so little hope? And why do some party discourses succeed while others fail in fostering affective attachment to their future imaginaries? Attending to temporal registers, as the paper seeks to do, offers a productive heuristic for analysing the affective potentials embedded in political actors' divergent temporal engagements. The paper concludes by discussing the ramifications for democracy when particular temporal registers come to dominate political discourse.