Rory Stewart

How is it possible for this party to go from basically being a minority to having a supermajority?

What on earth happened to the opposition?

What's happening with this youth vote?

I mean, she's kind of a right-wing traditionalist anti-immigration.

Okay.

So let me just give the Chinese perspective.

So I, over the weekend, spent a couple of hours with somebody from mainland China.

And he was emphasizing, he said, you know, to be fair, he said, look, some of this is propaganda in our school textbooks, but some of this is genuine belief.

The Japanese, from the Chinese point of view, invaded Manchuria, invaded China, committed unbelievable atrocities, killed millions of people.

After the war, there wasn't really a denazification, and they didn't apologize properly.

In fact, right-wing politicians, of which she's a good example, continued to visit the shrine dedicated to war criminals.

From the Chinese point of view, they're looking at this and they're saying, here is an aggressive nationalistic militarist power that has never come to terms with what they did during the Second World War.

And here's a leader from that faction saying that she is going to fight on Taiwan's behalf against China when Taiwan belongs to China.

So from the Chinese point of view, and this again isn't being picked up in the coverage, there's a real...

sense here from China, that they're thinking about Japan in the way that maybe, I don't know, Europeans might have thought about a resurgent Germany if it had suddenly militarized in the 1960s, not long after the war.

One of the questions here is, we've talked about this a lot, the Japanese debt to GDP ratio is enormous.

Off the scale, yeah.

And normally people say that that's less of a problem than it would be in the UK because a lot of it is owned by the Japanese, sort of internal things.

But there's a limit to that.

And it's interesting, the markets have responded positively to our election, but there will be many other people looking saying, where on earth is the Japanese economy going?