As soon as the international press got past the historic news Saturday that Japan had just chosen its first-ever female prime minister, Japan-watchers began to ask just what kind of leader Sanae Takaichi would be — especially in dealings with U.S. President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jingping.
In her third bid for the presidency of Japan’s ruling Liberal Democratic Party — election to which is tantamount to becoming prime minister — Takaichi, 64, won the runoff among LDP Members of Parliament by a narrow vote of 184 to 156.
Like Ronald Reagan after narrowly losing the Republican presidential nomination in 1976, Takaichi began courting the right-of-center grassroots members of her party following her loss of the LDP presidency to current Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba. When Ishiba announced he was stepping down earlier this year, the politician known as “the Lady of Steel” emerged as the favorite to succeed him.
Noting the strong showing in races for the House of Councilors (the upper House of the Japanese parliament) by the new MAGA-like party Sanseito in July of this year, Hideya Yamamoto, former Washington bureau chief for the Japanese news service Sankei Shimbun, told Newsmax. “In the past year, Japanese voters were keen to more conservative candidates, and both Kishida, and Ishiba were not enough for traditional LDP supporters.”
A onetime heavy metal drummer and TV anchor, Takaichi is very much like Trump; a unique brand of politician and someone who wears the modern nationalist-populist brand within her party. She is a member of the nationalist Nippon Kaigi organization (which seeks to change "the postwar national consciousness" from the verdict on World War II of the Tokyo Tribunal "as a fundamental problem").
Like the late Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, she is a vigorous supporter of repealing Article 9 of the Constitution and thus permitting Japan to rearm and maintain military forces, positions which clearly place her to the right of all three of Abe's successors as prime minister.
“China Hawk” is the characterization that almost always precedes Takaichi’s name in press reports. She has repeated the memorable admonition of her mentor Abe that “a Taiwan emergency is a Japan emergency” and April of this year, she visited Tokyo and met with President Lai Ting Che.
Perhaps most irksome to Beijing is that Takaichi has also regularly visited the Yasukuni Shrine, which memorializes Japan’s war dead including nine Class-A war criminals from World War II — memorials long denounced by Beijing. She insisted that, as prime minister, her visits to the Shrine would continue.
In a subdued statement, the Chinese Foreign Ministry said on Saturday morning: “it is hoped that Japan will abide by... its political commitments on major issues such as history and Taiwan, [and] pursue a positive and rational policy toward China."