Japan’s Iron Lady will try to woo Trump with tough stance on immigrants

So the fact that Japan, a country that began industrialising 150 years ago, is set to get its first female prime minister is not the great blow for equality it might once have seemed. All the more so when you find out that, like her great political idol, Margaret Thatcher, Sanae Takaichi, isn’t exactly a standard bearer for feminism.

“I will abandon any notion of work-life balance,” Takaichi, 64, promised as she accepted the presidency of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) last weekend. “I will work and I will work and I will work.”

“Her special gift, people say, is doing without sleep,” says Tomohiko Taniguchi, a close political ally and confidant of Takaichi. Again, echoes of Thatcher, who was reputed to need just four hours of sleep a night.

A young Takaichi is reported to have met her political idol in the 1990s when Thatcher visited Japan. “The encounter seems to have left a lasting impression,” says Taniguchi. “Whenever she embarks on a policy sure to make half the country her adversary she will surely hear Thatcher’s words resounding in her ears – the lady is not for turning.”

She is going to need all her tenacity and determination if she is to make it to the prime minister’s office.

Negotiations to secure enough votes in parliament are bogged down. The LDP needs the support of a smaller centrist party called Komeito. Its leader is objecting to Takaichi’s assertion that when she becomes prime minister, she will continue to pay homage at Japan’s most controversial religious site – the Yasukuni shrine in Tokyo.

The shrine honours Japan’s war dead – including a number of convicted war criminals. A visit from a sitting Japanese prime minister is a red rag to China and South Korea – both of which suffered extreme brutality at the hands of the Imperial Japanese Army.

This hardline image clashes somewhat with pictures of Takaichi as a young woman. They show her wearing motorcycle leathers astride a large Kawasaki Z400 motorcycle. After class she would reportedly dash off to band practice – a punk band in which she played the drums.

Somehow this punk-loving biker with a penchant for karaoke, evolved into what some now describe as a tightly disciplined workaholic with far-right views on history, the monarchy and immigration. According to some, even more right-wing than her great political mentor, and Japan’s longest-serving postwar prime minister, Shinzo Abe, who was assassinated in 2022.

“I was told that when she ran for the leadership in 2024 the US state department did not want her,” says Prof Koichi Nakano of Tokyo’s Sophia university, a longtime critic of the right-wing LDP.

“South Korea also complained that they couldn’t work with her. But this time around it seems the people in the state department that manage US-Japan relations are gone, and Donald Trump couldn’t care less.”

There is actually a good reason to believe Takaichi may get along with the US president better than her luckless predecessor – outgoing prime minister Shigeru Ishiba whose name Trump repeatedly failed to remember.

“Trump knows well that Takaichi is a protege of Abe – a man Trump admired,” says Taniguchi, “and ideologically they share common ground as social conservatives and opponents of woke culture.”

Trump and Abe were an unlikely duo when they first met back in 2016 – but they formed a genuine lasting friendship – much of it based around their common love of golf. “Whether she can make the most of that affinity will depend on her nerve and skill,” says Taniguchi, a professor at the University of Tsukuba.

One thing Trump is unlikely to object to is Takaichi’s attitude to immigrants. But a Japan led by her is a disquieting prospect for many of its growing foreign-born population.

By western standards that population is still tiny, about 3% of Japan’s total. But it is growing fast. So is the number of tourists arriving here, which could hit 40 million this year. A lot of Japanese people don’t like it. And rightwing politicians are fanning this disquiet by pointing to incidents of foreigners committing crimes or misbehaving.

Takaichi says that once in office she will establish new rules to screen foreign investment in Japan and will review rules that allow foreigners to buy land in Japan, particularly the Chinese.

“They are picking up on small issues and blowing them out of proportion,” says Prof Nakano. “It is not based on fact or careful analysis, it is a typical case of populist politics. But it has now resulted in official government policy framing foreigners as a problem.”

Photograph by Yuichi Yamazaki/ AFP via Getty Images