We’re witnessing “a new dawn for Japanese policymaking.”
So said Fumitake Fujita of the Japan Innovation Party. Ishin, as the party’s known, joined up with LDP this month, filling the void left by Komeito which abruptly bailed on its long-standing coalition with Japan’s ruling party, complicating Sanae Takaichi’s ascent to the Japanese premiership.
Blah, blah, blah. I know. You don’t want to read about the machinations of Japanese politics any more than you do an account of the legislative soap opera in ungovernable France, where Sébastien Lecornu survived two no confidence votes in a row last week following his re-appointment as prime minister.
(In a testament to the sheer blatant absurdity on display in France, Lecornu resigned just 26 days after Emmanuel Macron appointed him to replace François Bayrou, who last month lost a vote of no-confidence he himself called in act of snarky harakiri. Macron then re-appointed Lecornu. So, Lecornu was the seventh premier in the Macron presidency from September 9 to October 6 and then, technically or not, the eighth beginning on October 10.)
Anyway, Takaichi officially became Japan’s first female prime minister on Tuesday, and that’s a big deal. I can’t not mention it.
Japanese politics is famously misogynist. In academic parlance, “Japan ranks extremely low in global indices of political gender parity,” as The Tokyo Foundation put it in a 2023 research piece. Reddit’s feminism boards are less polite about it. “This is a society where misogyny is totally normalized and nobody really has a basic understanding of what a non-misogynistic society would look like,” one post reads.
Accordingly, every mainstream media account of Tuesday’s parliamentary vote to confirm Takaichi as premier included a reference to a “male-dominated” political scene. So congratulations to Takaichi for breaking the proverbial glass ceiling.
At the (considerable) risk of reducing Takaichi to a pair of factoids, the only two things you really need to know about Japan’s new PM are that i) she’s a Shinzo Abe disciple and ii) she fashions herself a kind of Eastern Margaret Thatcher. (“New Thatcher” went very wrong, very fast in the UK three years ago. This reincarnation can’t possibly be any worse than what The Spectator brutally described as “The tragedy of Liz Truss’s Thatcherite imitation.”)
On the domestic front, Takaichi’s pro-stimulus bent and reluctance to countenance rate hikes is in tension with inflation realities in Japan and what, at various intervals in 2025, looked like a global bond vigilante revolt against the appearance of fiscal profligacy across developed markets. The irony in Japan, though, is that a non-trivial number of voters seem to believe the solution to inflation is more stimulus. Japan, under Abe, spent nearly a decade trying to engineer inflation. When they finally got it, voters didn’t want it. Some proposals for alleviating the burden on households risk exacerbating the problem. That’s the domestic macro paradox Takaichi confronts.
On foreign policy, she needs to establish a good rapport with Donald Trump. Her mentor had no problem whatsoever in that department, making Abe an anomaly on the world stage. He was a “Trump whisperer” extraordinaire, and no one — certainly no foreign head of state — has come anywhere close to emulating Abe’s success in that regard. Unfortunately, Takaichi won’t be able to consult with Abe on Trump, Abe being three years dead.
Asia desperately needs a leader who can break through with Trump. Maybe Takaichi can be like “beautiful” Giorgia Meloni and win him over with smirks his simple mind mistakes for smiles. She’s a nationalist, she’s a right-winger and she’s a foreign policy hawk. All of that plays well with Trumpian tropes, so by appearances anyway, this is an opportunity for Tokyo to endear itself to a US president who has generally demonstrated an affinity for Japan, despite regularly complaining about imbalanced trade.
As for the Ishin line that the country will be better off for uniting “conservative forces” in pursuit of a nationalist agenda spiced with populism, suffice to say the jury’s out on that in Japan just like it is everywhere else that rallying cry’s been heard over the past decade.
I welcome and appreciate any international economic and political coverage you deem important enough to cover…
Yeah, the “deem important” part is critical. Because it’s played out over a decade — i.e., because it was very gradual — the “polishing” process of the site, inclusive of article structure, editorial cadence and so in, is often lost on long-term readers, I think. People will occasionally ask, for example, why I don’t do as much coverage of Turkey these days. But if you actually go back and read the articles from 2017 and 2018 (and even into early 2019), it was much more haphazard and scattershot. That has its benefits (it gives the impression to readers that you’re covering everything all at once), but I had to learn to pick my spots as the site matured, because at the end of every day, I have to be satisfied completely with what I’ve put out there. Even short articles have to be structured, thought out, have a definitive beginning and end and so on.
The strategy I employed in the early days was basically just, “If I see it, say something about it,” which on some days would result in as many as 10 mostly unstructured pieces of content. Readers were fine with that, but ultimately those weren’t “articles” on any strict definition of the term. The more obsessive I got over the years, the more determined I became that if I’m going to put it out there, it has to be a complete thought, and that rules out covering everything, everywhere all the time.
Bottom line: When people come here in the evenings to catch up, I don’t want them to feel like they’re just reading the rapid-fire musings of a news junkie, which is how it probably felt in the early days.
So when it comes to stuff like the latest twist in France’s crisis of government or a new Japanese PM, I have to wait for something definitive to happen that I can capture in a way which makes the average reader think to themselves, “Ok, this wasn’t exciting to read, but it was worth my time because it was succinct, complete and I understand why I needed to be informed about it.”
That, as opposed to the situation I’d put people in ca. 2018 when it wasn’t always clear why I chose one topic over another. You could imagine a new subscriber asking, back then, “And why did I just read about the Turkish lira for the fifth time this week?” No one’s going to remember this article about Japan, but on the other hand, no one who reads it is going to wonder why I wrote it. It’s plainly important, exciting or not.
I also remember some 3 day holiday weekends where you put out prodigious content, and I remember being pretty blown away…long live the quantity vs quality dynamic and balance in the HR…
I’m debating about re-subscribing to Nikkei Asia again, but finding out (here) that Takaichi is an Abe disciple successfully explains a lot (and for the cost of your subscription, much appreciated). I wish Takaichi-san (-sama?) well.
Takaichi-shucho if you’re being formal, -hancho if you’re being informal. And yes, that’s where the phrase “head honcho” came from.
She was an interesting choice. But really not all that surprising. The mainstream LDP has rightfully been losing relevance but opposition groups have only been able to enjoy fairly brief tastes of power.
In the last few years the dissolutionment among the notoriously uninvolved electorate has grown enough to challenge the LDP machine. It seems they opted to what they believed was the safer choice = a hard right candidate to fend off the challenges from small right-wing populist groups.
Perhaps that was the safer short-term choice, but by failing to choose on the the two more dynamic “younger faces,” they may well have sentenced themselves to increasing irrelevance.
That said, it is yet another example of the populist wave sweeping the globe. Something which suggests why some deluded people have quietly been buying gold and crypto.
https://metalinjection.net/news/japans-new-prime-minister-sanae-takaichi-is-a-metal-fan-drummer?utm_campaign=feed&utm_medium=referral&utm_source=later-linkinbio
She’ll do just fine with the President