Why is populism so unpopular in Japan?

Have the populist movements that have swept other countries quietly passed by the East Asian nation?

On April 1, 1987, then-Japanese Prime Minister Yasuhiro Nakasone delivered the death blow to the nation’s radical labour union movement. He broke the Japanese National Railways up into seven privatised railway firms – in the process, gutting the formidable National Railway Workers’ Union and eliminating the country’s leading platform for bottom-up politics. Nakasone’s breakup of the public railway operator was the coup de grâce for independent union power in the East Asian nation – achieving much the same as President Ronald Reagan’s firing of the members of the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization had in the United States in 1981 or Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s defeat of the National Union of Mineworkers had in the United Kingdom in 1985 (it was no coincidence that Nakasone was a personal friend and political ally of those leaders).