Sanae Takaichi: the most powerful woman in the world?

0:00This is The Guardian.

0:08Today, how the most powerful woman in the world wants Japan to march to a new beat.

0:22It wasn't the sort of scene you'd normally associate with Japanese diplomacy.

0:36What we've just inflicted on you is the sound of two very rusty drummers trying, not entirely successfully, to keep time to BTS's Dynamite.

0:51The one with marginally more rhythm is Sanai Takeuchi. And she ought to be the better player, to be fair. she used to play in a heavy metal band and was notorious for playing so wildly that she was always breaking her drumsticks. But since last autumn, she's been better known as the Prime Minister of Japan and that was her giving a lesson to her South Korean counterpart. Takeuchi has had a whirlwind first six months in charge, meeting world leaders as well as her metal heroes, Deep Purple. And now, Japan's first ever female leader wants to transform the world's fourth largest economy. On top of her to-do list?

1:33Scrapping its pacifist constitution, which has stopped Japan taking part in foreign conflicts since the Second World War.

1:42But what does that mean for the rest of the region? From The Guardian, I'm Helen Pitt. Today in Focus, the cult of Sanai Takeuchi.

1:55Justin McCurry, welcome to the show. Nice to see you. Good to see you too, Helen. Thanks very much. So you are The Guardian's Tokyo correspondent, which I've always thought is probably one of the best jobs in journalism. Remind us, how long have you been in Japan now? Oh, dear. Well, the quick answer is I'm in my mid-50s and I've been here more than half my life. I haven't changed a bit in all that time. So you've clearly had a front row seat for the rise of this fascinating woman who is now running your adopted country. And we already know that she plays the drums and she likes heavy metal. But give us some of the basics.

2:30What's her background? How old is she? And what sets her apart from her predecessors? She's 64, which is, you know, fairly young for a Japanese politician. There are plenty of them in their 70s and even early 80s. But she does come from an unconventional background in the sense that she's not an hereditary politician. So she doesn't have a well-known father or grandfather who served as prime minister or minister in previous governments. That's quite common among Japanese politicians, particularly those who rise through the ranks. Her mother was a police officer. Her dad worked for a Toyota affiliate.

3:12She had a sort of fairly ordinary middle class upbringing in Nara, which is a city in Western Japan that she now represents. But she was bright. She went to Kobe University, which is a good university, which is where I think she fell in love with drumming. She got into motorcycling. There are old photos of her sitting on motorcycles. And then she spent time working in the media. She also did an internship at the US Congress. She sort of steadily became a leading light in the conservative right of the party that's governed Japan almost without interruption since the end of the war, the Liberal Democratic Party.

3:50And she's a protégé of perhaps Japan's most famous post-war prime minister, and that's Shinzo Abe, who was, of course, assassinated three, four years ago. Indeed he was. And Takeuchi won the LDP leadership race in October last year, becoming prime minister with initially a very slim majority. And then she took this huge gamble in February by calling a snap election. And she emerged not just victorious, but with more than two thirds of the vote, which gives her huge power to change the country, as we'll come on to discuss. us. But before we do that, and at the risk of sounding a bit basic, I must admit that she came on my radar by her social media, where she seems to be always having a right old time.

4:32Can you just tell us what is she like as a person and how she has managed to inspire what looks almost like a bit of a personality cult in Japan? When I think about the devotion that she has attracted in her her followers and her voters, particularly young Japanese, then perhaps personality cult isn't that far wide of the mark. So she posts a lot on X, you know, far more than any of her predecessors. And she sometimes, apart from the fun stuff, she also goes into quite a lot of detail about policy and also answers some of her critics directly through the lens of social media, which is something that her predecessors didn't do.

5:15As a personality, for some people, some of her behaviour in public is being described as embarrassing. Oh, really? Like what? Well, when she... I mean, I quite liked it when she sang Happy Birthday in Italian to Giorgia Meloni.

5:43There was a time during her trip in March to Washington and she met Donald Trump and he was showing her around the White House. And then there was the auto pen photo, replace the portrait of Joe Biden. And she kind of let out an exaggerated laugh and sort of jumped up and down a bit. And people thought that was slightly embarrassing. and on the same trip she was sitting in the Oval Room with Donald Trump and said to him directly in Japanese,

6:17Donald using his first name, you're the only leader who can bring peace to the world. And I thought, I think a lot of people back here, perhaps even people who might have voted for her, thought that that was just a little too fawning. And, you know, obviously given recent events, kind of defies logic in many ways. Yeah, and I guess when I suggested that she'd spawned a personality cult, it's because I've seen some of the merchandise that she's inspired. And I can tell you, I've never seen anybody in a Keir Starmer t-shirt. I've never seen anybody thinking, oh, I would love to have the handbag that Theresa May carried when she was prime minister.

6:55Tell us a little bit about the merch. Yeah, well, there are shops in the Japanese National Diet Building doing where you like gift shots. That's the parliament, isn't it? The national diet. Yeah, that's the Japanese parliament. And you can buy all sorts of stuff there. But Takaiichi themed souvenirs are selling really well. And in fact, Japanese people love buying themed merchandise and souvenirs wherever they go. And Takaiichi is certainly taking advantage of that. You have plastic folders with the prime minister feeding a deer, a key chain of the prime minister. And these cookies have the US president, Donald Trump, on them too.

7:36Somebody I know, a Japanese voter who isn't a natural LDP voter, told me after she was elected prime minister, she said, well, she's a little bit like the chatty, smiley, but quite formidable middle-aged woman who lives down the road who you can, you know, you'll stop you in the street and have a chat. And, you know, while she's very easy to get on with, you probably wouldn't want to get on the wrong side of her either. And I think a lot of people kind of relate to that, especially after decades of having older male prime ministers who feel far less approachable and seem to occupy the Nagatacho bubble, Nagatacho being the sort of Japanese answer to Westminster.

8:21Right. And I hear that she reveres Margaret Thatcher. And Thatcher, of course, was famous for subsisting on very little sleep. Is Takeichi also a bit of a workaholic, would you say? Just after she became prime minister, she promised the people of Japan that she was going to work, work, work. And I think that's another reason why a lot of people thought, OK, right now here we have somebody who's not interested in her career as much as public service, which makes a refreshing change. But that's beginning to cause her problems because she's definitely lost weight and she's had one or two minor health problems.

8:56She attracted a lot of attention, not all of it positive, when she summoned some of her staff to her residence in the early hours of the morning, just so that they could prepare her answers for a debate later that day. And people were saying, look, working hard is one thing and working hard for the country is one thing, but expecting your colleagues to do the same is probably unsustainable. Yeah, because isn't there such a thing, a sort of concept in Japan of death from overwork? Yeah, karoshi, there's an actual word for it. Can we just talk about how big or little a role her gender plays in how she does politics?

9:38Because I think some people don't actually see her election as a win for gender equality, do they? Why is that? Yeah, for a few good reasons. I think anyone who expected Takeichi as prime minister to be sort of a champion of some of the issues that have been pushed by progressive Japanese, Japanese feminists over the past few years and decades. They were naive because all they had to do was look at her track record. So there are three, I suppose you could sort of call them culture war battlegrounds in Japan at the moment. One is whether women should be allowed to become reigning empresses as opposed to the spouse of the reigning emperor.

10:20The second is whether married couples should be allowed to keep separate surnames. When you get married in Japan, you have to choose one or the other, so you can't keep the name you had before you were married. In the vast majority of cases, well over 90%, I think, the wife will take her husband's name. and the third is whether Japan should legalise same-sex marriages. Now she is opposed to same-sex marriage, she's opposed to allowing married couples to keep separate surnames and she's opposed to having female empresses. And it seems like everybody, well, foreign leaders seem to be queuing up to meet her, to visit her.

11:04Keir Starmer's been over there, as you say. She's been to Washington to meet Trump. She's been hanging out with Georgia Maloney. I guess it's not just, I presume, that she's fun to hang out with, but because Japan right now occupies a particularly important geopolitical position. Why do you think that she is in such demand? It's partly down to the novelty factor of having a female Japanese prime minister. But as you say, Japan, along with South Korea, their US military allies, security allies, they're in a particularly unstable part of the world. Of course, there are other parts of the world that are actually at war at the moment.

11:41But the predictions have always been that the Asia-Pacific will be the next major flashpoint for two reasons. One, because of North Korea's development of nuclear weapons and also, you know, Chinese designs on Taiwan. If the Taiwan Strait is, as some people have said, to be the spark that lights World War III, then Japan is going to very much be in the thick of that.

12:14And what kind of Japan has she taken the reins of right now, kind of economically? Because I'm assuming when I think of Japan, and this might sting any Japanese listeners, but I think of it as a former economic powerhouse. And that's probably because I'm a 90s kid when Japan was the place, it was the future. And it feels a bit like South Korea has stolen a march on Japan in recent years as Japan's population has aged. How is Japan looking right now? I mean, it's interesting that you mentioned Japan's aging population, and that is also something that South Korea is battling with as well. So there are all sorts of concerns, especially among younger people, about their pensions, and then among policymakers, how Japan is going to afford to pay for health care and welfare costs for a ballooning elderly population, population of older people.

13:11So I think it's those structural issues that pose the biggest danger to the Japanese economy in the long run. And what does the new prime minister want to do about these domestic problems? What is her vision for Japan? I think her main focus so far is Japanese security. And in fact, on that same visit to the White House, she said that she wanted to repeat in the Oval Office something that her mentor Shinzo Abe had said several years ago when he was with Trump and she ended, she said in English, Japan is back. And I think for her that's less to do with economic power and more to do with military power.

13:55Yeah, which we're going to come on to talk to. And when it comes to these demographic challenges that you've outlined. What's her prescription for that? Does she think that there should be more immigrants let into Japan in order to fill the workforce shortages? When in fact, when Abe was prime minister, he came to the realisation that the solution is immigration and relaxing Japan's strict rules on immigration and guest workers, sort of migrant workers. And there is a record number of foreign workers in Japan now, 2.6 million, and that's out of a population of around 125 million. Mainly young people from other parts of Asia who work in food service industry, in farming, in fishing, in manufacturing.

14:45But she's also under pressure to do something to curb, guess what, immigration. partly because fringe parties of the you know to the right of the LDP have become more popular but at the same time she knows full well the massive contribution that that migrants make to the Japanese economy let's talk a bit about her approach to foreign policy and defense and security and I think before we do that it's probably worth you laying out what I think of her fairly controversial views on on Japanese history yeah she's a historical revisionist and And she's part of a movement within Japanese conservatism, particularly in recent decades, that wants to end what they call the masochism, Japan's view of its conduct during the war.

15:32Masochism, gosh. So to put that in context, a big part of that is to offer a different explanation. Some would say whitewash Japan's conduct during and before the Second World War, during its colonial rule of the Korean Peninsula and its invasion of parts of China, and to sort of end this culture of constantly apologizing for actions made by people seven, eight decades ago. She recently initiated a plan to amend Japan's pacifist constitution and its kind of no war clause, which was established after the Second World War at the behest of the Americans, I think. And to do that, she will use the two third majority that she was able to win when she gambled on the snap election in February.

16:23Sanae Takeuchi has successfully secured a historic supermajority in the February 8th snap election. Talk us through what she wants to do there and how controversial that's proving in Japan. It's going to be another year before we know exactly what Takeji wants to do to the pacifist constitution. But it's no secret that she is not an admirer of Article 9 of the constitution, which is this key clause of the Japanese constitution and what it does. And this is the official wording. it means that japan renounces war as a sovereign right and prohibits the maintenance of armed forces with war potential and then it goes on to say that japan must never threaten or use force to resolve international disputes so what that means in practical terms is that japan can only use military force as a purely defensive measure if it comes under attack first it's actually important to say that legislation has been passed in in the past decade that kind of stretches that interpretation so that japan might be able to come to the aid of an ally i.e the united states but if you're looking at purely at what the constitution says then japan can only use military force as a defensive response which is why the japanese military is actually called the self-defense forces how is it yeah she could do the least possible which would be to specifically mention the self-defense forces because they're currently not mentioned so that's one end of the spectrum at the other end would be to yeah to scrap article nine and replace it with something that in her words would make japan a more normal quote unquote normal country, i.e.

18:20to be able to not be restrained by this purely self-defensive posture and to be able to freely join allies in wars overseas. I mean, in the current context, that could mean sending Japanese forces to the Strait of Hormuz to fight along the Americans and the Israelis. Well, Trump would like that. Trump would love that and in fact did ask her to do that. And she had to say no because of the constraints placed on her by the constitution look i expect japan to step up because you know we have that kind of relationship and we we step up with japan we have 45 000 soldiers in japan we have uh we spend a lot of money on japan so i hear they get more than 90 she was quite sort of reluctant wasn't she when she said no yeah but this feels like a huge deal in a country that had two atomic bombs dropped on it it is and once the debate gathers pace um it's going to be incredibly controversial.

19:18And again, it's one of those issues where it's difficult to say the Japanese public want this or don't want this, because I think if it was just a question of giving legal recognition to the self-defense forces, then I think opinion polls suggested about 60 % of Japanese are in favor of that. But if it's wholesale rewriting or scrapping of Article 9 and a total renunciation of Japan's post-war pacifism, then it's going to be a lot more complicated.

19:51There's an important generational factor in that a lot of people, they remember the absolute misery of Japan's militarist past and they remember its aftermath.

20:06I was alone on the road. And then I felt the flash. Everything I was seeing turned to white. There are still lots of people who survived the atomic bombing of August 1945, and the same goes for Nagasaki. And it's difficult to overstate how much it meant and still means to a certain generation of Japanese to live and look forward in a country that was finally at peace with its neighbours and at peace with itself. And I think that's why it still touches a nerve with so many people. If for some reason, Takeuchi had been able to stretch the definition of the constitution and use some of the laws on collective self-defence and all the rest of it and send a Japanese minesweeper or something to the Strait of Hormuz, and a single Japanese sailor had been killed, her popularity would just plummet within minutes of that news being broken.

21:14It's a huge risk. Yeah. And how is opposition building to these proposals, the spectre of such a huge change? Yeah, well, it's building outside parliament. That's the first point to make, because most MPs are in favour of some sort of constitutional reform. But what we've seen in the last few weeks is a wave of demonstrations all over Japan, in all of the big cities, a lot of the bigger towns, but also here in Tokyo, outside the Dyat building.

21:54According to one study, I think 60 % of all of the protesters have been women, but we've seen these waves of demonstrations First of all, calling for an immediate end to the Iran war. Secondly, demanding that Japan not get involved. And third, and perhaps most important in the long term, that Takechi abandon any idea of altering Japan's peace constitution. How unusual, you know, you're a veteran Tokyo correspondent, been there for decades. How significant do these protests feel? The protests do feel like a moment for me. And, you know, as you say, I've been here a long time, but it feels like there's something different about these, that the vast majority of the people there are just people who may not have been particularly interested in politics or geopolitics in the past.

22:53But now that they see this looming threat, they've decided to come out and show their support.

23:02Coming up, can Japan remain pacifist in an increasingly dangerous world?

23:21and just in looking on from many thousands of miles away you can see why Takechi feels that Japan might need to be more assertive militarily because it is surrounded by nuclear-armed adversaries in China and Russia and North Korea. And it's in a very vulnerable position. Japan is located in a geopolitically complicated area and potentially one that could turn nasty quite quickly. And then, of course, there's the perennial Taiwan question, whether China thinks that now or sometime in the not too distant future would be the right time for them to make a move on on Taiwan, you know, a democratic, self-governed island that Beijing regards as a renegade province that will one day be reunited with the Chinese motherland.

24:10So Japan is in a precarious position. And I don't think many people would argue with the fact that Japan needs to be able to defend itself. And I think that's been given more urgency under Trump's sort of second time in the White House because although he's always insisted that it's time for Japan to take more responsibility for its own defence and to pay more towards the bilateral security relationship, in the last year or so, I think there is this feeling that if something were to happen in Taiwan and Japan were to be drawn into that in some way, could we rely on the United States to come to our aid.

24:49And what has Takei actually said about what she thinks Japan should do if China attacks Taiwan? She was in parliament and somebody asked her a question about Taiwan. And apparently she had a scripted answer that would have, you know, probably not even been commented on very much. But she started, again, reportedly ad-libbing and said, well, if there were to be a conflict in the Taiwan Strait, then Japan would have the right to become militarily involved because having a war involving a superpower like China on our doorstep would pose a threat to Japan's very existence. And of course, that has set up a huge row between Japan and China that is now at least a couple of months old and doesn't really show much sign of slowing down.