Japan enters the final four days of campaigning for the 20 July House of Councillors election with opinion surveys pointing to an unusually fluid race. Half of the chamber’s 248 seats—125 this time—are being contested. Because the ruling Liberal Democratic Party and its coalition partner Komeito together hold 75 non-contested seats, they must win 50 on Sunday to preserve their majority of 125. Latest analyses by Nippon TV’s polling unit and other major outlets show support for Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba’s LDP sliding. The party is now projected to secure only the mid-30s of the seats in play, and Komeito is struggling to keep its tally above ten. A series of gaffes, including a senior LDP lawmaker’s resignation over remarks about the New Year earthquake, has compounded voter fatigue with the long-dominant party. Benefiting from that discontent is Sanseito, an anti-immigration, anti-globalist party founded in 2020. An Asahi Shimbun poll found Sanseito drawing as much as 14 % of unaffiliated proportional-representation voters, while Yomiuri reports the party’s candidates running competitively in multi-seat districts such as Tokyo, Kyoto and Osaka. The Democratic Party for the People is also matching or outperforming early-campaign expectations, further fragmenting the opposition vote. Campaign discourse has been dominated by cost-of-living relief, possible consumption-tax cuts, constitutional revision, wage growth and immigration. Social-media monitoring by TV Asahi shows "foreigners,” “tax cuts” and “wage hikes” among the most-shared election keywords, underscoring how cultural and economic anxieties have shaped the debate. If the coalition falls short of 50 seats on Sunday, the upper house will again be split, forcing the government to negotiate every piece of legislation with an emboldened opposition and potentially triggering a leadership challenge within the LDP.