In 1935, a man attacked a newspaper publisher outside his Tokyo office for allowing Americans to play baseball at a sacred shrine. The logic behind that attack is still active in Japan today.
The observation
I'm planning to attend my first baseball game in Japan this week, at Meiji Jingu Stadium. Looking into the history of the stadium pulled up something I hadn't known: in 1935, the man who organized Babe Ruth's 1934 tour of Japan was attacked outside his office by a nationalist who considered the American presence at the shrine a defilement. That detail connected things already on my mind: Japan's reliance on imported food, the declining birthrate, and the rise of ultranationalism. This piece is an attempt to put those threads together.
What the data shows
Japan in 2026 imports 62% of its calories, gets 85% of its energy from overseas, has a farming population that is 80% over 65, and is losing population faster than any country in the developed world. The fastest-growing political movement calls for self-sufficiency and opposes immigration. Those two positions, taken together, don't add up. The data is worth looking at directly.
A morning in February, 1935
Katsusuke Nagasaki arrived early and waited outside the Yomiuri Shimbun building in Tokyo. When Matsutaro Shoriki, the paper's publisher, arrived and started up the stairs, Nagasaki stepped forward and pulled a short samurai sword from beneath his coat. The blade caught Shoriki across the head, leaving a wound that would later measure sixteen inches. Nagasaki fled, then walked into a police station later that day and gave a detailed confession.
His stated reason: Shoriki had defiled the memory of the Meiji Emperor by allowing Babe Ruth and a team of American all-stars to play baseball at Meiji Jingu Stadium. The 1934 barnstorming tour had taken place just two months earlier. Ruth had hit 13 home runs. More than half a million people had lined the streets of Tokyo to welcome the Americans. Shoriki, rather than disbanding the Japanese team that had played against them, kept the group together and founded Japan's first professional baseball club, which eventually became the Yomiuri Giants.
Shoriki survived. Nagasaki's logic did not disappear.
The stadium today
Meiji Jingu Stadium, opened in 1926, is one of only four professional stadiums still standing where Babe Ruth played. The other three are Fenway Park (1912), Wrigley Field (1914), and Koshien Stadium (1924). Fenway and Wrigley have been refurbished and are considered among the most treasured venues in American sport. Koshien is a pilgrimage site for Japanese high school baseball.
Jingu Stadium is scheduled for demolition. A redevelopment plan approved by the Tokyo Metropolitan Government will replace it and the adjacent Chichibunomiya Rugby Stadium with a pair of 200-meter commercial towers. Construction has begun. A coalition of urban planners, architects, and environmental scientists has submitted an open letter opposing the project, citing the 100-year-old ginkgo trees and the park's origins as a public donation honoring the Meiji Emperor. The appeal has not stopped the work.
The space that Nagasaki considered sacred enough to kill for is being converted into commercial real estate. This detail is not the point of this piece, but it is hard to pass over.
The same premise, ninety years later
The ultranationalist movement Nagasaki belonged to was part of a faction with real institutional reach: military officers, secret societies, men who attempted coups and occasionally succeeded in reshaping Japanese policy through assassination and intimidation. Their violence was extreme, but their logic was coherent on its own terms. Japan was strong, Japan was sovereign, Japan could be defended by keeping the outside world at arm's length.
Today's version is different in form, though not entirely in content. The older ultranationalist groups are still visible: vans fitted with loudspeakers driving through Tokyo, parking outside the Chinese and Korean embassies to broadcast recorded slogans. But the more significant development is electoral. Sanseito, a party formed in 2020 and built largely through social media, won 14 seats in Japan's upper house in 2025, up from one seat in 2022. Its platform calls for the preservation of traditional culture, anti-globalization, opposition to immigration, and agricultural self-sufficiency. Its slogan is "Japanese First," spoken as "Nihonjin Fāsuto," with "fāsuto" being the English loanword for "first." A nationalist platform for cultural self-sufficiency, named with a word borrowed from the language it is reacting against.
The party is popular among men in their 30s and 40s. It emerged from the same anxiety that drives similar movements in other countries: economic pressure, a sense that the country is being changed faster than people can process, and a political establishment that has not addressed the underlying decline. Those concerns are real. What is less clear is whether the platform being built on top of them can actually deliver what it promises.
What the numbers say
Japan is one of the world's largest importers of agricultural products. The biggest single source of those imports is the United States. The same country whose baseball players Nagasaki considered a defilement of sacred ground now provides a substantial portion of Japan's food supply.
Japan food self-sufficiency rate, calorie basis (%) — selected years
The demographic situation compounds this. Japan's working-age population has already fallen roughly 15% from its peak. By 2040, projections put the labor shortfall at around 11 million workers. Oxford Economics estimates Japan could stabilize its workforce in the 2040s, but only if it consistently accepts around 500,000 foreign workers a year. The current foreign resident population is 3.2% of the total, and rising partly because the Japanese population is shrinking around it.
The contradiction at the center
The Sanseito platform contains a structural impossibility that rarely gets examined directly. It calls for food self-sufficiency. To grow more food domestically, Japan needs farmers. The farming population is elderly and not being replaced. Young Japanese are not moving to rural areas in meaningful numbers. The platform also opposes the immigration that would provide the agricultural labor. And it offers no serious account of how a shrinking population grows more of its own food with fewer working-age people.
A Japan that is self-sufficient in food, culturally cohesive, free from foreign dependency, and capable of defending its own interests without outside entanglement.
A Japan that imports 62% of its calories, 85% of its energy, has an aging farm workforce with no replacement pipeline, and needs 500,000 foreign workers a year just to stabilize its labor force by 2040.
This is not a left-versus-right argument. It is a question about whether a political premise corresponds to the actual conditions it claims to address. Nagasaki's premise in 1935 assumed a Japan that was whole, sovereign, and capable of being defended by exclusion. The Japan of 2026 is structurally interwoven with the outside world in ways that cannot be undone by an election result or a slogan.
There is a related dynamic at work in my hinoe uma piece: how a belief doesn't need to be consciously held to shape behavior at scale. The nationalist platform may work similarly. It doesn't need to be internally consistent to win votes. It needs to feel recognizable to enough people who are genuinely anxious about something real.
The question worth asking
Nagasaki was not irrational. He was operating from a clear set of convictions about what Japan was, what threatened it, and what defending it required. From inside that frame, what he did made sense. The problem was not the logic; it was that the premise, a Japan that could be kept whole by keeping the outside world out, was already under pressure in 1935 and has since become untenable.
The same premise sits inside the current nationalist platform, largely unexamined. Japan cannot grow 62% more of its own food without farmers. It cannot produce those farmers without either a birth rate reversal that no policy has managed to deliver, or immigration. It cannot fund the social systems that support an aging population without a working-age population large enough to pay into them. These are not ideological positions; they are arithmetic.
None of this means the underlying anxieties driving the nationalist resurgence are invented. Economic pressure, a sense of cultural dislocation, a political establishment that has not addressed the structural decline: these are real. But the platform being built on top of those anxieties points in a direction the actual conditions of the country cannot support. Anyone trying to read Japan's political and business environment clearly right now needs to hold both things at once: the feelings are genuine, and the platform doesn't add up.
The stadium where Nagasaki made his stand is being demolished for a commercial tower. The country he was defending now imports much of its food from the United States. Some premises outlast their moment without anyone quite deciding to keep them.
The Shoriki tour did not just bring Babe Ruth to Japan. It produced Japan's first professional baseball team. The players who faced the Americans became the founding roster of what is now the Yomiuri Giants. The man who was attacked for enabling the tour is now known as the father of Japanese professional baseball.
Opposition to the redevelopment has included Haruki Murakami, who credits a game at Jingu in 1978 with inspiring his first novel. Critics note that Fenway Park dates from 1912 and Wrigley from 1914, both preserved. The project is proceeding. The new stadium will have a roof and artificial turf.
Foreign residents are 3.2% of Japan's population, rising partly because Japan's total population is shrinking. Japan is, as one analyst noted, recoiling at immigration before demographically meaningful immigration has even begun. The backlash is arriving ahead of the thing it claims to oppose.
Japan's government target is 45% food self-sufficiency by 2030, up from 38% today. It is not on track. With 80% of farmers over 65 and rural depopulation accelerating, the trajectory points the other way. The self-sufficiency platform and the immigration platform are in direct conflict with each other.
SABR Asian Baseball Research Committee, Robert K. Fitts on the 1934 tour and the Shoriki assassination attempt.
Japan Times, Japan food self-sufficiency rate, October 2025.
The Diplomat, Japan's demographic outlook and immigration labor projections, December 2025.
The Conversation, Sanseito's 2025 upper house election results and platform.
OECD Agricultural Policy Monitoring, Japan chapter, 2025.
Wikipedia: Matsutaro Shoriki, biography and baseball history.