Meet Japan’s Iron Lady Sanae Takaichi is polarising the nation

As a teenager, Sanae Takaichi no doubt riled her parents now and again with her love of motorbikes and heavy metal. Today, poised to become Japan’s first female prime minister at the age of 64, she is polarising a nation. Some credit “Japan’s Iron Lady” with the steely resolve required to tackle the country’s domestic problems and stand up to China. Others lament the apparent fact that to succeed as a woman in Japanese politics you have to adopt the worst instincts of the men, from policies that prop up the patriarchy — men only on the imperial throne, compulsory shared surnames for married couples — to a nativist ultranationalism.

While Takaichi’s premiership will represent a milestone for modern Japan, it’s important in Japanese politics not to place too much weight on the frontman — or woman. The reality is more like one of those bands where the bassist writes the songs but, disliking the limelight, hires a series of relatively disposable vocalists to present them to the public. Alongside machinations in her own party, the LDP, where senior background figures largely decide who gets the premiership and how long they keep it, Takaichi’s fortunes may come to depend on how she deals with two intertwined issues: the economy and immigration.

First, the economy. People in Japan, and the young in particular, are furious about a combination of high taxes, low wage-growth, rising inflation and insecure job prospects. Japanese governments of the past 30 years have struggled with some or all of these problems, trying and largely failing to find solutions against the backdrop of a national debt that has now ballooned to an extraordinary 235% of GDP.

One of the reasons why Japan’s economic problems have been so intractable in recent years is the country’s rapidly declining population — now shrinking by almost a million people every year. Nearly a third of Japanese people are over the age of 65 and after years of hard graft, they expect to be looked after in old age. But that takes money and it takes carers. Japan is short on both. Nursing has long been in crisis, with just one applicant now for every four jobs advertised.

Back in the 2010s, the hope was that “care bots” might see to the needs of the elderly and infirm, freeing up younger people to increase productivity in the wider economy. But the widespread deployment of humanoid caregivers is not expected until well into the 2030s, if ever, in part because of the level of mechanical precision combined with advanced AI required of a robot designed to look after humans. Even robots that simply provide companionship have turned out to be prohibitively expensive and to require a self-defeating level of human oversight: charging them, fixing them, getting them from A to B.

Instead of robots, Japan could decide to depend on carers from Vietnam or the Philippines — two of the major sources of overseas labour in Japan. But inviting further immigration would be tricky politically. Japan’s foreign resident population has risen by an average of around 10% each year over the past three years. Some are predicting that the country’s total overseas population will need to rise from 3% at present to 10%, in order to cater to the needs of the labour market — from care work to construction. And yet Japanese public opinion remains ambivalent at best.

Japan has a long history of isolationism, from the literal (though partial) closing off of the country in the early modern era through to national and ethnic exceptionalism during much of the 20th century. Many Japanese operate with a dim but unmistakable hierarchy of foreignness in mind, with white westerners near the top. But hostility towards migration is not just about race. It’s about the spectre of a Japanese way of life that depends on respect and restraint being undermined by newcomers who either don’t understand it or don’t intend to live that way. To denounce the Japanese as polite but ultimately xenophobic, as many commentators do, fails to get at the tangle of racial antipathies and cultural anxieties that exists in many people’s minds and hearts.

Politicians in Japan have tended to avoid getting into any of this, tackling public concerns about immigration either by stressing economic need or by liberalising visa arrangements on the quiet — hoping to help the labour market in the short-term without needing to have a serious national conversation.

That approach has backfired of late, with the rise of populist nationalist parties like Sanseitō which are able to claim that the political establishment has been pulling the wool over people’s eyes about immigration. The party ran a “Japanese First” campaign in elections to Japan’s upper house this summer, claiming that a “silent invasion” was afoot. They gained serious traction among young men in particular.

At the local level, tensions are rising. A case in point is southern Saitama prefecture, where a small Kurdish population has experienced a backlash both on the streets and online. In Kyoto, meanwhile, a booming tourist industry has drawn in large amounts of foreign labour. Critics argue that the shared housing foreign workers live in, combined with more and more old homes being converted into Airbnbs, threatens the steady ghettoisation of a once-proud city.

Meanwhile, social media is whipping up anger towards foreigners. Witness the viral videos, some making it onto Japanese TV, showing foreign tourists shouting at train station staff, riding around on the backs of bin lorries or doing pull-ups on a red torii gate at a Shinto shrine. Officials in Nara, Takaichi’s hometown, have been forced to deny reports that tourists are hitting or kicking the sacred deer that run wild through that ancient city’s streets. And just last month, a cultural exchange programme between four Japanese municipalities and four African countries was cancelled after false claims spread that it was a new immigration route into Japan.

Takaichi’s success in her party’s leadership race is partly down to the hope that she is sufficiently nationalistic in outlook and reputation to slow Sanseitō’s rise. But the danger is that, by tacking right on immigration, Takaichi exchanges the public conversation about immigration that Japan desperately needs for a gesture politics that fails to address the country’s problems and makes life harder for Japan’s overseas population.

The longer-term challenge for Japan, which may well shape the country in the decades to come, takes the form of a question: what does it mean to be Japanese? Is it primarily a question of blood or is there potential for “Japanese” to function a little like “British” or “French”: more a civic identity than an ethnic one? For all the antipathy that he attracted during his long stint as prime minister between 2012 and 2020, Shinzō Abe was among those to talk about developing a “civic nationalism” for Japan: a vision of what it means to be Japanese that is built around values, rights and standards of behaviour. So far, this vision hasn’t gained much traction in Japan’s political debates, but it’s difficult to see what a viable alternative would be beyond a steadily souring status quo.

For Japan’s migrant population to have secure rights and to feel welcomed rather than merely tolerated, then either Takaichi or a near-term successor will need to find ways of confronting a worried and increasingly restive public with their realistic options for the future. If technology alone can’t ride to the rescue and Japan’s population decline is otherwise irreversible, then the best bet may indeed be a properly integrated overseas population alongside a more capacious understanding of what it means to be Japanese. Takaichi might take a lead here from local governments in Japan, which are pioneering attempts to help migrants learn Japanese, understand their rights, and mingle with locals rather than living apart. With luck, the day will come when this larger “Japanese” community, secure in its shared identity, can tut-tut in unison at tourists behaving badly.

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