Japan’s first female prime minister promises history, but her ascent may only deepen the old order.

By Michael Cummins, Editor, October 4, 2025

Sanae Takaichi has become Japan’s first female prime minister—a milestone that might look like progress but carries a paradox at its core. Takaichi, sixty-four, rose not by challenging her party’s patriarchal order but by embracing it more fiercely than her male rivals. Her vow to “work as hard as a carriage horse” captured the spirit of her leadership: endurance without freedom, strength yoked to duty. In a nation where women hold less than sixteen percent of parliamentary seats and most are confined to low-paid, “non-regular” work, Takaichi’s ascension is less rupture than reinforcement. She inherits the ghost of Shinzo Abe, with whom she shared nationalist loyalties, and she confronts a fragile coalition, an aging electorate, and a looming Trump visit. Her “first” is both historic and hollow: the chrysanthemum blooms, but its shadow may reveal that Japan’s old order has merely found a new face.

Under the humming fluorescent lights of the Liberal Democratic Party’s headquarters in Tokyo, the old men in gray suits shifted in their seats. The air was thick with the stale perfume of cigarettes and the accumulated dust of seventy years in power. The moment came suddenly, almost anticlimactically: after two rounds of voting, Sanae Takaichi was named leader. The room stirred, applause pattered weakly. She stepped to the podium, bowed with a precision that was neither humble nor triumphant, and delivered the line that will echo through history: “I will work as hard as a carriage horse.”

Why that image? Why not the fox of Japanese cunning, or the crane of elegance, or the swift mare of legend? A carriage horse is strength without freedom. It pulls because it must. Its labor is endurance, not glory. In that metaphor lay the unsettling heart of the moment: Japan’s first woman prime minister announcing herself not as a breaker of chains but as the most dutiful beast of burden. Ushi mo aru kedo, hito mo aru—“Even cattle have their place, but so do people.” Here, in this paradoxical victory, the human became the horse.

In Japan, the ideal of gaman—stoic endurance in the face of suffering—is praised as virtue. The samurai ethos of bushidō elevated loyalty above will. Women, in particular, have long been praised for endurance in silence. Takaichi’s metaphor was no slip. It was a signal: not rebellion, but readiness to shoulder a system that has never bent for women, only asked them to carry it. In the West, the “first woman” often suggests liberation; in Japan, Takaichi presented herself as a woman who could wear the harness more tightly than any man.

The horse metaphor might also be personal. Takaichi was not a scion of a dynasty like her rival, Koizumi. Her mother served as a police officer; her father worked for a car company. Her strength was forged in the simple, demanding work of postwar Japan—the kind of tireless labor she was now vowing to revive for the nation.

For the newspapers, the word hajimete—first—was enough. But scratch the lacquer, and the wood beneath showed a different grain. The election was not of the people; it was an internal ballot, a performance of consensus by a wounded party. Less than one percent of Japan had any say. The glass ceiling had not been lifted by collective will but punctured by a carefully aimed projectile. The celebration was muted, as if everyone sensed that this “first” was also a kind of last, a gesture of desperation dressed in history’s robes.

Deru kugi wa utareru—“The nail that sticks out gets hammered down.” Takaichi did not stick out. She was chosen precisely because she could wield the hammer.

Her rise was born of collapse. The LDP, which had dominated Japanese politics like Mount Fuji dominates the horizon, was eroded, its slopes scarred by landslides. In the 2024 Lower House election alone, it lost sixty-eight seats, a catastrophic erosion. After another defeat in 2025, it found itself, for the first time in memory, a minority in both houses of the Diet. Populist formations shouting Nippon daiichi!—Japan First—had seized the public imagination, promising to protect shrines from outsiders and deer in Nara from the kicks of tourists. Stagnant wages, rising prices, and the heavy breath of globalization made their slogans ring like temple bells.

Faced with collapse, the LDP gambled. It rejected the fresh-faced Shinjiro Koizumi, whose cosmopolitan centrism seemed too fragile for the moment, and crowned the hard-line daughter of Nara, the protégé of Shinzo Abe. In choosing Takaichi, the LDP announced that its path back to power would not be through moderation, but through continuity.

The ghost of Abe hovers over every step she takes. His assassination in 2022 froze Japan in a perpetual twilight of mourning. His dream—constitutional revision, economic reflation, nationalist revival—remained unfinished. Takaichi walks in his shadow as if she carries his photograph tucked inside her sleeve. She echoes his Abenomics: easy money, big spending. She continues his visits to Yasukuni Shrine, where the souls of Japan’s war dead—among them Class A criminals—are enshrined. Each bow she makes is both devotion and provocation.

Hotoke no kao mo san-do—“Even a Buddha’s face only endures three times.” How many times will China and South Korea endure her visits to Yasukuni?

And yet, for all the historic fanfare, her stance on women is anything but transformative. She has opposed allowing a woman to reign as emperor, resisted reforms to let married couples keep separate surnames, and dismissed same-sex marriage. Mieko Nakabayashi at Waseda calls her bluntly “a roadblock to feminist causes.” Yet she promises to seat a cabinet of Nordic balance, half men and half women. What does equality mean if every woman chosen must genuflect to the same ideology? One can imagine the photograph: a table split evenly by gender, yet every face set in the same conservative mold.

In that official photograph, the symmetry was deceptive. Each woman had been vetted not for vision but for loyalty. One wore a pearl brooch shaped like a torii gate. Another quoted Abe in her opening remarks. Around the table, the talk was of fiscal stimulus and shrine etiquette. Not one mentioned childcare, wage gaps, or succession. The gender balance was perfect. The ideological balance was absolute.

This theater stood in stark opposition to the economic reality she governs. Japan’s gender wage gap is among the widest in the OECD; women earn barely three-quarters of men’s wages. Over half are trapped in precarious “non-regular” work, while fewer than twelve percent hold managerial posts. They are the true carriage horses of Japan—pulling without pause, disposable, unrecognized. Takaichi, having escaped this trap herself, now glorifies it as national virtue. She is the one horse that broke free—only to tell the herd to pull harder.

The global press, hungry for symbols, crowned her with headlines: “Japan Breaks the Glass Ceiling.” But the ceiling had not shattered—it had been painted over. The myth of the female strongman—disciplined, unflinching, ideologically pure—has become a trope. Conservative systems often prefer such women precisely because they prove loyalty by being harsher than the men who trained them. Takaichi did not break the mold; she was cast from it.

Other nations offer their mirrors: Thatcher, the Iron Lady who waged war on unions; Park Geun-hye, whose scandal-shattered rule rocked South Korea; Indira Gandhi, who suspended civil liberties during India’s Emergency. Each became a vessel for patriarchal power, proving strength through obedience rather than disruption. Takaichi belongs to this lineage, the chrysanthemum that blooms not in a wild meadow but in a carefully tended imperial garden.

Her campaign rhetoric made plain her instincts. She accused foreigners of kicking sacred deer in Nara, of swinging from shrine gates. The imagery was almost comic, but in Japan symbols are never trivial. The deer, protectors of Shinto shrines, bow to visitors as if performing eternal reverence. To strike them is to wound purity. The torii gates mark thresholds between profane and sacred worlds; to defile them is to profane Japan itself. By weaponizing these cultural symbols, Takaichi sought to steal the thunder of far-right groups like Sanseitō, consolidating the right-wing vote under the LDP’s battered banner.

But the weight of Takaichi’s ideological baggage—the nationalism that served her domestically—was instantly transferred to the fragile carriage of Japan’s foreign policy. To survive, the LDP must keep its coalition with Komeito, the Buddhist-backed party rooted in Soka Gakkai’s pacifism. Already the monks grumble. Nationalist education reform? No. Constitutional militarism? Impossible. Imagine the backroom: tatami mats creaking, voices low, one side invoking the Lotus Sutra, the other brandishing polls. Ni usagi o ou mono wa issai ezu—“He who chases two rabbits catches none.”

Over all this looms America. Donald Trump, swaggering toward a late-October Asia tour, may stop in Tokyo. Takaichi once worked in the U.S.; she speaks the language of its boardrooms. But she campaigned as a renegotiator, a fighter against tariffs. Now reality intrudes. Japan has already promised $550 billion in investment and loan guarantees to secure a reprieve from harsher duties. How she spends it will define her. To appear submissive is to anger voters; to defy Trump is to risk reprisal. Imagine the summit: Trump beaming, Takaichi bowing, their hands clasped in an awkward grip, photographers snapping.

Even her economics carry ghosts. She revives Abenomics when inflation demands restraint. But Abenomics was of another time, when Japan had fiscal breathing room. Reviving it now is less a strategy than nostalgia, an emotional tether to Abe himself.

These contradictions sharpen into paradox. She is the first woman prime minister, yet she blocks women from the throne. She promises parity, yet delivers loyalty. She vows to pull the carriage harder than any man, yet the cart itself has only three wheels.

Imagine the year 2035. A museum exhibit in Tokyo titled The Chrysanthemum Paradox: Japan’s Gendered Turn. Behind glass: her campaign poster, a porcelain deer, a seating chart from her first cabinet. A small screen plays the footage of her victory speech. Visitors lean in, hear the flat voice: “I will work as hard as a carriage horse.”

A child tugged at her mother’s sleeve. “Why is the horse sad?” she asked, pointing to the animated screen where a cartoon carriage horse trudged endlessly. The mother hesitated. “She worked very hard,” she said. “That’s what leaders do.” The child frowned. “But where was she going?”

Outside, chrysanthemums bloom in autumn, petals delicate yet precise, the imperial crest stamped on passports and coins. The carriage horse keeps pulling, hooves clattering against cobblestones, sweat darkening its flanks. Will the horse break, or the carriage? And if both break together, what then?

Shōji wa issun saki wa yami—“The future is pitch-dark an inch ahead.” That is the truth of her victory. The chrysanthemum shines, but its shadow deepens. The horse pulls, but no one knows toward what horizon. The first woman had arrived, but the question lingered like incense in an empty hall: Was this history’s forward march, or merely the perfect, tragic culmination of the old order?

THIS ESSAY WAS WRITTEN AND EDITED UTILIZING AI