The A.I. Evangelists on a Mission to Shake Up Japan

With a ponytail, an indigo suit and a black T-shirt covered in lines of computer code, Takahiro Anno stands out in the button-down halls of Japan’s government.

Mr. Anno, 35, a software engineer and lawmaker, leads Team Mirai, a political party founded by techies that showed surprising strength this month in national elections. The party came from nowhere to win an eye-popping 11 seats in the lower house of Japan’s Parliament by promoting government chatbots, self-driving buses and other Promethean new technologies.

“A.I. is like fire,” Mr. Anno, a member of Japan’s upper chamber, the House of Councilors, since last year, said in an interview last week at his office in Tokyo. “Everything will be changed.”

Artificial intelligence is rapidly reshaping politics around the world, with officials turning to chatbots to help draft policies, and A.I.-generated misinformation spreading on a wide scale. In Britain, Denmark and elsewhere, A.I.-focused candidates and parties have started to appear on the ballot.

But few groups have had the success of Team Mirai (Team Future). Its leaders aim to use technology to make government more responsive and efficient — and to address issues like corruption and Japan’s acute labor shortage. They have said savings achieved through A.I. could be used to lower contributions to pension and health care plans for working-class families.

“Make slow politics fast,” said a campaign brochure. “Technology makes your life easier.”

Team Mirai is still a small presence in the 465-seat lower house, the House of Representatives. But the rise was sudden, especially for a new group with only about 2,600 registered members.

The party, which had aimed to win five seats, ended up securing more than twice that number through Japan’s system of proportional representation. It garnered more than three million votes, almost 7 percent of all votes cast, and performed particularly well among urban people in their 40s and 50s, according to exit polls. The victory was so surprising that conspiracy theories circulated online suggesting that the engineers were part of a Chinese influence operation.

A critical reason for Team Mirai’s success, analysts say, is its contrarian stance on some hot-button issues. It argued that the consumption tax on food should be maintained, not suspended, going against a populist idea that was embraced by other parties.

“Voters may well have been attracted to its problem-solving, ‘neither left nor right’ approach,” said Tobias Harris, the founder of the advisory firm Japan Foresight.

Now Team Mirai’s newly elected representatives, with an average age of 40 and degrees from top universities, face an arduous task. They must work with established groups like the Liberal Democratic Party, led by Japan’s prime minister, Sanae Takaichi, to pursue their policies.

The engineers have ambitions to build state-of-the-art databases that shine light on political donations and explain arcane bills. But they must deal with Japan’s bureaucracy, famous for its fealty to fax machines, floppy disks and paper. They are already running up against rules that ban laptops and tablets in some parliamentary rooms.

“There’s so much paperwork,” said Aoi Furukawa, 34, a newly elected lawmaker, as he worked inside Mr. Anno’s office on a recent day. A whiteboard was covered with buzzwords like “internet of things” and “plurality is here.”

Mr. Furukawa, who previously worked as an engineer in Silicon Valley, said he saw parallels between coding and writing legislation.

“A lot of people believe in our view of the future,” he said.

The party has tapped into sentiment among some voters that Japan needs to move more swiftly to develop and deploy artificial intelligence. While robots have long been part of the culture, Japan lags countries like the United States and China in adopting A.I.

Team Mirai gained momentum in July, when Mr. Anno won the party’s first seat in Parliament.

In the Feb. 8 lower house elections, Team Mirai fielded 14 candidates — 11 men, three women — with degrees from institutions like the University of Tokyo, the University of California, Berkeley and London Business School, and experience at companies like IBM and Sony.

The candidates made the pitch that technology could help address everyday concerns, like the rising cost of living, and they spoke about the need for Japan to invest in scientific research. The party deployed a chatbot to explain and get feedback on its proposals, including cutting taxes for families with children and deploying driverless buses. (To date, the bot has fielded nearly 39,000 questions and received almost 6,200 suggestions.)

As Team Mirai’s freshman class of lawmakers settles into Parliament this week, Mr. Anno said he was hopeful they could make an impact.

Mr. Anno, who on the side has published a sci-fi thriller, “Circuit Switcher,” about a businessman being held captive in a self-driving car, said that some people in the West might see A.I. as a job killer or the cyborg assassin in “The Terminator.” But in Japan, he said, people are more likely to associate the technology with Doraemon, the cuddly robotic cat from a popular manga series.

“Japanese people do not fear A.I.,” he said. “We’re used to doing things with A.I.”

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