As a young woman in the late 1970s, Sanae Takaichi commuted six hours a day by bus and train from her parents’ home in western Japan to attend university. She was a fan of heavy metal music and Kawasaki motorcycles who yearned to move out. But her mother insisted at first that she stay home, forbidding her from living in a boardinghouse before marriage.
“I dreamed of having my own castle,” Takaichi wrote in a 1992 memoir.
On Tuesday, Takaichi won election as Japan’s Prime Minister, the first woman to do so in the nation’s history. It was the pinnacle of an improbable rise in politics and a milestone in a country where women have long struggled for influence.
Takaichi, 64, who grew up near the ancient Japanese capital of Nara, defies easy labels. She once spoke bluntly about the challenges of working in politics as a woman in Japan, yet she is now the leader of the traditionalist, male-dominated Liberal Democratic Party. She has expressed concern about Japan’s reliance on the US, but has also said she hopes to work closely with President Donald Trump. She is an amateur drummer who idolises bands like Iron Maiden and Deep Purple, yet she also wears blue suits to pay homage to her other hero, the former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.
Her male colleagues were sometimes dismissive, she recalled, and they often conducted business at saunas and social clubs, where it wasn’t feasible to meet with female lawmakers.
“It’s really difficult for a woman to meet a man one-on-one,” she told The Associated Press in 1993. “People are watching, and I don’t want some strange scandal being invented. We can’t use the hours after 5pm.”
Takaichi, a protégé of Shinzo Abe, Japan’s longest-serving Prime Minister, who was assassinated in 2022, is expected to move Japan farther to the Right, responding to a recent populist wave that bears some similarities to Trump’s MAGA movement. She has embraced hawkish policies on China; pushed the message that “Japan is back”; played down Japan’s atrocities during World War II; and promised to more strictly regulate immigration and tourism.
Takaichi will face her biggest test yet as she deals with fresh uncertainty about Japan’s military and economic alliance with the US. She is expected to meet next week in Tokyo with Trump, who has rattled Japanese officials with tariffs and suggestions that the country should pay more for the presence of American troops in the region.
During her early years in parliament, she forged an enduring alliance with Abe, a lawmaker from an elite family with a nationalistic worldview. The two found common ground on issues like increasing military spending and adding a more patriotic tone to history textbooks.
When Abe was elected to his first stint as Prime Minister in 2006, he appointed Takaichi to his cabinet, making her one of the most visible women in Japanese politics. He reappointed her in 2012, at the beginning of his second term, which lasted eight years. She became a fierce defender of his policies, including efforts to revise Japan’s Constitution to unfetter its military after decades of postwar pacifism, and his economic programme, which emphasised cheap cash and government stimulus efforts.
Takaichi tried to persuade Abe to run again in 2021, but he declined. When she entered the race, he threw his support behind her. “Takaichi is the true star of the conservatives,” Abe said at the time. She lost that race and fell short in another bid in 2024.
When Abe was assassinated outside a train station in Nara, while giving a stump speech, Takaichi was devastated. She said at the time that she had “never felt so physically and mentally down”.
“I have to work very hard from today,” she wrote on social media, “otherwise I’d have to apologise to him.”
When Shigeru Ishiba announced in September that he would resign as Prime Minister, after a series of embarrassing electoral defeats for the LDP, Takaichi raised her hand again to lead her party. She beat four men, riding a wave of support among rank-and-file party members with a message about turning people’s “anxieties into hope”.
Yukitoshi Arai, Takaichi’s former hairdresser in Nara said, “I don’t think she’s an ‘iron lady’,” he said, referring to a nickname given by the British media to Thatcher. “Her vibe is that of a Kansai woman.”
New York Times News Service