In the four months since Takaichi’s election as party leader, Japan has been swept up in “Sanakatsu” (さな活) and “Sana-mania” (サナマニア). A bag and pen sold out after she was seen using them, and merchandise depicting her is available across the country. Japanese leaders often enjoy a honeymoon period, but Takaichi’s popularity is categorically different than her predecessors: A December Sankei News/FNN poll found 92 percent support among 18-to-29-year-old voters; multiple other surveys put the figure above 80 percent.
Jeff Kingston, a professor of Asian studies at Temple University Japan, told TMD that Takaichi represented a notable departure from other LDP leaders. “After Suga, Kishida, and Ishiba, they’re all basically okay politicians, nothing terrible, but they’re a bit gray, faceless,” he said. “None of them you could describe as dynamic.” That isn’t true of Takaichi. She’s more socially conservative than her base—supporting a traditional patriarchal family structure and opposing gay marriage—but Japan’s first female leader projects energy and initiative at a time when many Japanese have felt the country was sliding. She stood up to China in a high-profile diplomatic spat over Taiwan; she’s doesn’t hail from a political dynasty (her father worked at an automotive parts manufacturer, her mother was a police officer); and she has projected a competent image on the world stage, with scenes going viral on Japanese social media of her drumming songs from Kpop Demon Hunters and BTS with South Korean President Lee Jae-myung and taking selfies with Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni. She played drums in a heavy-metal band as a college student, and she rode a Kawasaki motorcycle before entering politics.
“If you look in this century, Japan’s had three strong leaders,” David Boling, a principal at The Asia Group, told TMD. “First was Koizumi Junichiro, then Abe Shinzo, and [Takaichi] looks like she is poised to potentially be in that grouping.”
After the LDP faced a political funds scandal in recent years implicating more than 80 Diet members, the dovish center-right Komeito party demanded stricter regulations on corporate donations to political parties, which Takaichi wouldn’t commit to. The split ended a decades-long alliance between the two parties and cost the LDP a potent electoral asset: Research has estimated that roughly 26,000 Komeito supporters per constituency regularly voted for LDP candidates.
In its place, the LDP entered into a confidence and supply arrangement with Ishin, a party based in Osaka that doesn’t neatly fit onto the political spectrum. The party generally supports smaller government, the decentralization of power from Tokyo, and market-oriented reforms alongside progressive social policies such as same-sex marriage and free high school education—but its leaders have been criticized for nationalist, revisionist rhetoric regarding Japan’s wartime record. Despite Western publications like The Guardian referring to Ishin as “far-right,” Japanese surveys have found that voters typically view the party as centrist or liberal. Ishin’s chief policy priority has been reducing the size of government, including a 10 percent cut to Diet seats from 465 to 420, for which legislation has already been drafted. Polling in December found 78 percent of Japanese approve.
The other notable change in this election was that Takaichi became the first LDP leader to address immigration and improper tourist behavior. She was the only LDP leadership candidate who explicitly raised concerns about how foreigners are behaving in Japan—and once elected, she created a new ministerial office to manage the effects of tourism and immigration. Japan saw approximately 42.7 million visitors in 2025—a 16 percent increase from 2024—and the government has proposed tripling the international departure tax, raising visa fees, and adding a Japanese-language test for permanent residency. These moves effectively neutralized the anti-foreigner message that had fueled the rise of Sanseito, a new party that gained millions of votes between the 2022 and 2025 elections by running on a “Japanese first” platform. In yesterday’s election, Sanseito won just 15 seats—a significant increase from its pre-election two, but far short of the 30 its leader had predicted.
After leaving the LDP coalition, Komeito merged with the center-left Constitutional Democratic Party of Japan (CDP) to form the Centrist Reform Alliance—but the faction had little time to build a clear message and lacked a charismatic leader who could compete with Takaichi’s star power. The new coalition had a combined pre-election total of 172 seats; it now has only 49 and the leaders of both parties say they will resign. Ishin’s 36 seats were won mostly in and around its Osaka base—adding just two to its pre-election tally of 34 and underscoring the party’s difficulty expanding nationally despite its role in government.
Takaichi enters the post-election period as a foreign-policy hawk. Her remarks in the Diet last November—when she said a Chinese attack on Taiwan would represent an existential threat to Japan, triggering collective self-defense provisions—provoked a furious response from Beijing. But she wasn’t changing Japanese policy, Kingston said; she just made “explicit what has been implicit.” She walked the comments back enough to prevent escalation but never fully retracted them, and her poll numbers rose as a result. Japan’s defense spending is on track to hit 2 percent of GDP, with Takaichi accelerating the timeline by two years, and during a campaign stop in Niigata, she raised the possibility of revising Article 9 of the Constitution—the pacifist clause that has constrained Japanese military activity since 1947.
In an interview with TMD, however, Boling warned against overstating Takaichi’s hawkishness. “She does not want to escalate tensions with China,” he said. “China is Japan’s number one trading partner. … Japan cannot pick up and move to another neighborhood.” Then again, Komeito had also served as what its former leader, Secretary General Ishii Keiichi, called the hadome—the brake—on the LDP’s push to expand Japan’s military posture, and that brake is now gone.
Following her party’s victory on Sunday, Takaichi said she “will be flexible.” She told Japanese public broadcasting on Sunday that she wanted voters to back her vision of “responsible, proactive fiscal policy.” But Japan has serious, long-term economic problems, and it’s unclear whether her policies will do much to ease them.
Japan has been grappling with persistent inflation. Consumer prices rose 3.2 percent year-over-year in 2025, and have now remained above the Bank of Japan’s 2 percent target since early 2022. The inflation rate hovered near zero between 2000 and 2010, and most workers never expected—or tried to negotiate—pay increases. The explosion in tourism, meanwhile, stems from the remarkable weakness of the yen, which now trades at around 157 to the U.S. dollar—down from roughly 110 in early 2022—reducing Japanese consumers’ buying power for imported goods.
Additionally, Japan’s population is shrinking, its workforce is aging, and a former senior foreign ministry official recently told Sneider that by the end of the century, “there will only be 50 million Japanese,” down from the current population of about 122 million. Takaichi hopes to address cost-of-living frustrations by pausing the food tax for two years—a move Boling called “politically wise” even if it doesn’t make fiscal sense, since it took the issue away from opposition parties who had all backed a cut. At a press conference this morning, Takaichi said the cut would remain in place until the introduction of tax credits and direct handouts, and called for a cross-party panel to produce an interim report on financing the measure before summer.
“Economists will say that cutting taxes and spending will only fuel inflation,” Boling said. “She is seen to be a supporter of so-called Abenomics”—which emphasized fiscal spending and loose monetary policy—“but that was when Japan was dealing with deflation. They have an inflation problem now.”
Kingston agreed. “If deficit spending could revive the Japanese economy,” he said, “the Japanese economy should be doing just fine, because Abe did lots of deficit spending.”
Takaichi has also announced a record ¥122 trillion (roughly $777 billion) budget for the fiscal year starting April 1, and has generally ruled out raising income taxes. Bond markets reacted nervously to the fiscal expansion, but Japan’s stock index, the Nikkei 225, surged by more than 5 percent this morning and briefly topped 57,000 for the first time.
“Most Japanese feel its best days are behind it,” Kingston said. “They feel threatened from outside. They see the norms and traditions have ebbed, and things are changing. In the midst of change, they want to feel certainty, and they want to have a leader who pumps them up and says, yeah, we can do this.”