When candidates for the leadership of Japan’s ruling Liberal Democratic party (LDP) were invited during a debate to say a few words in English, Sanae Takaichi kept her contribution brief. “Japan is back,” she declared.
The 64-year-old rightwinger, who has cited Margaret Thatcher in her quest to build a “strong and prosperous” Japan, beat her centrist rival, Shinjiro Koizumi, in a runoff election at the LDP headquarters in Tokyo on 4 October.
On Tuesday, eight decades after the end of the second world war, she made history by becoming the country’s first female prime minister, receiving 237 votes in an election in parliament’s 465-seat lower house and then winning a similar vote in the less powerful upper house.
Her victory was secured after the LDP, which has governed Japan for most of its postwar history, agreed on Monday to form a coalition with the rightwing Japan Innovation party, known as Nippon Ishin.
The result is redemption for Takaichi, who last year ran unsuccessfully against the previous prime minister, Shigeru Ishiba. Her second challenge for the leadership briefly faltered after criticism of her unsubstantiated claims, made during a debate, that foreigners were physically abusing “sacred” deer in Nara, where she has been an MP since 1993.
It also represents a victory for the right of the LDP, which has spent the past year licking its wounds under the more moderate Ishiba.
Takaichi has a direct ideological connection with the former prime minister Shinzo Abe, who was assassinated in 2022, sharing his revisionist views on Japan’s wartime conduct – a position that could cause friction with Japan’s neighbours.
Takaichi has been critical of China and makes regular pilgrimages to Yasukuni, a shrine in Tokyo that honours Japan’s war dead, including convicted war criminals. She has displayed similarly conservative credentials on social policy: she opposes same-sex marriage and allowing married couples to use separate surnames – a move popular with voters that she says would undermine traditional family values. She is similarly dismissive of the idea of reigning empresses.
Abe also looms large in her economic policy. Takaichi has said she supports aggressive public spending to stimulate the world’s fourth-biggest economy. She has, though, headed off a potential conflict with the US president, Donald Trump – whom she will meet in Tokyo next week – by dropping suggestions that she would try to renegotiate a trade and investment deal with the US. Trump has agreed to lower tariffs on Japanese cars and other items in return for $550bn in Japanese investment.
Her focus on migration – a subject that occupied the first eight minutes of a 15-minute campaign speech – is seen as an attempt to win back voters who abandoned the LDP in national elections last October and this July in favour of rightwing minor parties, including the up-and-coming Sanseito.
During her campaign, Takaichi called for restrictions on non-Japanese people buying property and a crackdown on illegal immigration – a view shared by Ishin.
A fan of the Hanshin Tigers baseball team, Takaichi played drums in a heavy metal band while at university and counts scuba diving and watching martial arts among her hobbies.
