Japan’s Hawkish New Prime Minister

Japan elected its first female prime minister, Sanae Takaichi, on Tuesday, positioning the nation for a rightward shift.

• Mrs. Takaichi was elected as leader of the Liberal Democratic Party earlier this month.
• A hard-line conservative, she views Margaret Thatcher as a role model and wears dark blue suits to honor her.
• She is viewed as a China hawk, often warning that Japan is at risk from the Chinese Communist Party’s exploitative trade policies and growing military belligerence.

• She previously vowed “Nordic” levels of female representation in her cabinet, but ended up naming just two of 19.

While Takaichi says the Japan-U.S. alliance is “essential” to Japanese security, she wants the Japanese military to take on a larger, more autonomous role and has advocated for revising Japan’s pacifist Constitution.

• “A constitution should be created which reflects the heart of Japan,” she said at a meeting of the Research Commission on the Constitution. She advocated revising paragraph 2, the section that formally bans Japan from maintaining “land, sea and air forces.”

Fragile coalition: Takaichi’s goals are ambitious, but she won only 237 of 465 votes cast in the lower house of the legislature, following her party’s recent disastrous losses in both houses. Her government was formed thanks to an uneasy, last-minute coalition she built with the Japan Innovation Party. Analysts do not expect this coalition to last. “[D]ifferences of opinion will doom the alliance,” Toshimitsu Shigemura, a professor of politics at Tokyo’s Waseda University told the Telegraph.

Whether or not Takaichi’s coalition lasts long enough for her to accomplish her hawkish goals, watch for Japan to continue its march toward remilitarization and independence from the U.S.