Japan’s Iron Lady
Why did it take so long for Japan to have a female prime minister? This may seem like an unfair question. After all, the United States has never elected a female president, and a woman has never presided over the Communist Party of China. Even the Netherlands, once a bastion of liberalism, has never had a female prime minister.
There have been several female heads of state in Asia, but they were almost always the daughters of famous male leaders. Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi was the daughter of Jawaharlal Nehru, the country’s first prime minister, while South Korean President Park Geun-hye was the daughter of Park Chung-hee, the military strongman who ruled in the 1960s and 1970s.
Still, Japan clearly has a gender problem. In the Global Gender Gap Report 2024, Japan ranked 118th out of 146 countries, whereas South Korea, arguably a more Confucian society than Japan, was 94th, and China was 106th. Less than 20% of Japanese women have leadership roles in politics or business, despite their relatively high level of education. Almost as many women attend university in Japan as men, but only 20% of students at the top institutions are female.
Given this, the recent inauguration of Takaichi Sanae as Japan’s prime minister is undoubtedly a breakthrough. But does it signal a fundamental shift in Japanese gender relations? Will Takaichi help other women crack the glass ceiling?Formun Üstü
Takaichi’s conservative views on social issues are not encouraging. She opposes allowing married women to keep their family names, as well as same-sex marriage. Her rhetoric about immigrants – without whom Japan can no longer properly function – is tinged with bigotry.
During her campaign to lead the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), Takaichi pandered to right-wing nationalists by spreading rumors about foreign tourists’ bad behavior in Japan. And she has appointed only two female ministers to her 19-member cabinet, which is fewer than in some previous Japanese governments.
Even so, one must admire Takaichi’s rise to the top of Japanese politics, which is still very much a man’s world – leading a male-dominated conservative party, no less. She is unusual in other ways, too. Unlike many top politicians in Japan, or indeed other female leaders in Asia, Takaichi does not come from a political family. She grew up in a conservative provincial home, with a mother who thought that girls didn’t need to attend university. Takaichi insisted that she should.
Like her idol, Margaret Thatcher, the United Kingdom’s first female prime minister, Takaichi presents herself as an “Iron Lady” who can be tougher than the men. (Thatcher famously scolded US President George H.W. Bush not to go “wobbly” when Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990.) That also means maintaining a feminine appearance and being ready with a smile to balance her masculine traits and interests, which include heavy metal music and motorcycles.
Perhaps the only way a woman can climb to the top of conservative parties in most countries is to be more hawkish than her male counterparts. Former German Chancellor Angela Merkel was not particularly hawkish in her political views, but she was more ruthless than her male rivals, which enabled her to outmaneuver them. Once in power, Merkel projected a kind of maternal reassurance: In her warm embrace, all would be well.
This was not Thatcher’s style; nor is it Takaichi’s. She is hawkish on immigration and defense, and, like her mentor, the late Prime Minister Abe Shinzō, she has no time for dwelling on Japanese crimes in World War II and sees no problem with sending an offering to the Yasukuni Shrine, where convicted war criminals are among those honored.
Takaichi’s decision to boost defense spending to 2% of GDP by March and her desire to revise Japan’s pacifist constitution have pleased US President Donald Trump, whom she seemingly won over at their first meeting. Trump even introduced her as “a winner,” noting that they had “become very close friends all of a sudden.” But Takaichi’s pugnacious views are so alarming to the Chinese that they have yet to congratulate her on her victory.
Just as Thatcher disparaged the more liberal-minded politicians in the Conservative Party as “wets,” Takaichi has a knack for making some of her fellow LDP members – including her predecessor, the hapless Ishiba Shigeru – look like wimps. This could make her an effective leader. She may even succeed where Abe failed, by revising the constitution and giving the Japanese military a greater role.
The one area where she differs from Abe, at least in her rhetoric, is immigration. Abe relaxed visa requirements to ensure that Japan’s industrial, agriculture, and construction sectors could hire the foreign labor they need. He also promoted tourism to bring in added revenue. In contrast, Takaichi has taken a tough stance on migration. But, by taking the sting out of far-right parties that trade in xenophobia, she might have an easier time quietly continuing Abe’s policies.
Takaichi seems uninterested in helping women to succeed in public life. And yet her example may be her greatest contribution on this front. When Barack Obama won the US presidency in 2008, Black people in Harlem were dancing in the streets. I remember a proud father shouting in joy: “My son can become president of the United States!” Japanese mothers can now feel the same about their daughters. That is no small thing.
Ian Buruma is the author of numerous books, including Murder in Amsterdam: The Death of Theo Van Gogh and the Limits of Tolerance, Year Zero: A History of 1945, A Tokyo Romance: A Memoir, The Churchill Complex: The Curse of Being Special, From Winston and FDR to Trump and Brexit, The Collaborators: Three Stories of Deception and Survival in World War II, and, most recently, Spinoza: Freedom’s Messiah (Yale University Press, 2024).