Do we like Sohei Kamiya?
Our score: 1 out of 10. A long run of his own words against LGBTQ+ people and gender equality plus a party built on anti-foreigner politics, with no real good found to set against it.
Born in Fukui in 1977, Kamiya spent years as a local councillor in Suita, Osaka, from 2007. Reuters describes him as a former supermarket manager and English teacher. In 2020 he started Sanseito on YouTube, and in 2022 he won an upper house seat. By 2025 the party had gone from two seats to 15 in the upper house.
The story that follows him is the 2022 campaign. The Algemeiner reported that he told a rally Sanseito would not sell Japan out to “Jewish capital”, and the crowd applauded. Reuters also notes he first got notoriety for appearing to call for the emperor to take concubines, which the AP says was floated if the government was slow on succession. Neither was a slip in the dark; both were said on the way to winning a seat.
On the harm check, he fails. The Washington Blade reports he called Japan's gender equality policies misguided in a July 2025 speech, opposed marriage equality, and campaigned against LGBTQ education in schools. The AP says he has blamed gender equality policies for the falling birth rate, and The Nation says his early YouTube videos questioned the Covid vaccine.
On foreigners, Reuters says his party campaigned against a “silent invasion” of immigrants, and over 1,000 groups backed an NGO statement warning of rapidly spreading xenophobia. He says the opposite: “We have never called to drive out foreigners.” Asked why the party skews male, he said “Maybe because I am hot-blooded, that resonates more with men.” Where you land depends on whether you hear a migration policy or a scapegoat.
The recent chapter is messier. His May 2026 lecture at the University of Tokyo May Festival was cancelled after a bomb threat, and protesters had demanded a written pledge retracting what they called discriminatory and false statements. Kamiya said on X that nothing could be done. A bomb threat is no way to answer a speech, and that part is not on him. Since then The Nation reports his party's support has dropped to 2.5 percent from a peak of 7.6.
The good stuff is thin. No charity work, kind acts or standing up at a personal cost turned up in what we read. The most that can be said is that he built a political school for would-be candidates, and that he got there from a supermarket floor with a YouTube channel. That is a real story, but it is a story about reach, not about kindness.