Rising from obscurity to attain a seat in the upper house of the Diet in summer 2019, the Party to Protect the People from NHK and its leader, Tachibana Takashi, have utilized a purely internet-based strategy to establish a community-cum-forum for voices locked out of the mainstream media. This article attempts to establish a foundation for understanding the new Japanese internet politics heralded by the emergence of this party through a chronicling of the party's rise and decline, and an ethnographic analysis of the viewer experience of the October 2019 livestream of its Ikebukuro speeches.
