Sanae vs. Anime

What does Prime Minister Takaichi’s landslide mean for Japan's pop culture?

Only three months into office, Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi played a risky game, calling for a “snap election” to consolidate the power of her party in parliament. The results came in on Sunday. She won by a landslide, securing a mandate for her policies (or more accurately, believes that she secured one — but more on that at the end.)

I am not a political pundit, so I’ll leave a detailed analysis of her proposed policies to specialists like Observing Japan. But there’s no disputing that Takaichi is a hugely divisive figure. She’s Japan’s first female Prime Minister, yet also widely viewed as hostile to women’s equality. She is hailed as a “straight talker,” yet continues to downplay her party’s massive ongoing financial scandal and its inability to cut ties with the Unification Church. Even more concerning to many critics domestic and foreign is her campaign to revise the pacifist principles out of Japan’s constitution. And her attitude towards foreign visitors and residents seems rooted more in suspicion than inclusion, making many of us wonder where we really stand in the eyes of society.

She also possesses undeniable charisma. She’s a rare face not descended from any of the political family dynasties that manufacture most prime ministers. She enjoys unprecedented support from young Japanese. (The Japanese media has dubbed this “Sana-katsu,” meaning something like “stanning for Sanae.”) Supporters hail what they see as Japan’s rightward shift; critics point out that most young voters get all of their political information from online influencers rather than news sources. And there’s the undeniable novelty of seeing Japan’s first female Prime Minister, and a very young-feeling one to boot. As professor Koichi Nakano of Sophia University put it recently, “Being more popular of the past leaders of the LDP is not so difficult, given that all of them, all of them, were middle-aged boring men.”

So. What does Takaichi’s victory mean for Japanese pop culture, at home and abroad? If the controversial Chinese AI-generated meme making the rounds of Ultraman blasting her is any indication, there’s a lot of ambivalence out there. But let’s take off our Ultra-hero costume suits for the moment and (sigh) put on our grown-up suits.

Takaichi, not without precedent but in ways arguably deeper than her predecessors, “gets” pop culture. She wove her love for motorcycles and for rock drumming into her public persona, most meme-ably with her counterpart in South Korea. She quoted the anime Attack on Titan to Saudi investors. She has tweeted (or whatever it’s called these days) about how often foreign dignitaries mention anime, films, and music in their interactions with her. Italy’s PM Giorgia Meloni, a kind of prototype for Takaichi in being an ultraconservative nationalist herself, went so far as to post a selfie of the two of them, using what seemed to be OpenAI’s pilfered-Ghibli filter. (You can practically hear the progressive Hayao Miyazaki groaning.)

“I feel that the strength of Japan’s anime content enhances our diplomatic power,” Takaichi said in a December 2025 photo-op meeting with content-industry luminaries including Ghost in the Shell director Mamoru Oshii, J-pop superproducer Tetsuya Komuro, and the pop artist Takashi Murakami. (Unsurprisingly absent from this lineup: Mr. Miyazaki.) She then pledged 55 billion yen in government assistance to bring Japan into line with the amount other countries such as rival South Korea (75 billion) regularly spend on promoting their cultural industries.

This isn’t the first time a Japanese politician has promised to boost the nation’s content producers. The notorious Cool Japan Fund has been operating in various forms since 2013, spending tens of billions of yen with little to show for it. But the government seems to be taking things more seriously this time around. In September, the Ministry of International Trade and Industry proposed five “principles of Entertainment policy,” the most notable of which pledged never to interfere with the content of the work being supported. Western culture warriors predictably misinterpreted this as a shot at localization professionals. In reality it was more likely aimed at Sanseito, who if you’ll recall, wants to subject manga, anime, and games to government “health reviews” if they ever take charge.

This is important, because Japan’s popular culture is, by and large, progressive. And conservative leaders know it. Takaichi’s predecessor, the late Shinzo Abe, was so upset by the social criticism of Hirokazu Kore-Eda’s Shoplifters that he snubbed the director after the film won the Palm d’Or. Miyazaki famously decked Studio Ghibli out in anti-nuclear slogans after the meltdowns of 2011. Japan’s pop culture succeeds because it celebrates individuality and weirdness and speaks truth to power, things that inevitably rub conservative regimes the wrong way. There are exceptions, of course. There always will be. But if you’re looking at anime as a whole, the arc bends towards social justice.

Takaichi doesn’t seem to be as thin-skinned as Abe was. But she faces a more existential problem. Japan’s pop cultural charisma – in academic terms, its soft power – is due only in part to the quality of its content. It is also predicated upon the values Japan embodies. Japan of the Eighties, in its financial tiger phase, was continuously bashed abroad. Modern Japan is more of a (Hello?) kitty. Flying under the radar, staying out of the headlines on touchy issues, Japan’s political vagueness provides a blank canvas for consumers to project their own values upon, whatever they might be. And its leaders know this. It’s key to their efforts to lure millions of tourists here, and it'‘s key to exporting content, which is rapidly becoming a pillar of the economy. The clever hawk hides its talons, as the old Japanese adage goes. The furor Takaichi touched off with her remarks about defending Taiwan a few months back represented a rare slip.

One might argue that Takaichi’s hawkishness (pun intended) and desire to revamp the constitution are rooted in the realpolitik of changing times: China’s ascendance, and Trump’s undermining of America’s longstanding commitments to allies around the globe. Japan is surrounded by increasingly powerful rivals, and how can it trust a partner as mercurial as the US has become? But the minute Japan wades into controversy, the minute the hawk stops hiding its talons, is the minute that its soft power will begin to wane. You can be feared or loved. You can’t be both. You can buy fear; you have to earn love. Which is, of course, why strongmen (or women) inevitably resort to force. It’s a lot easier to threaten opponents (or chainsaw them) than it is to charm them.

Fortunately, Japan isn’t shooting anyone yet. It still occupies a twilight zone in the collective consciousness untrammeled by current events. So Japan’s content continues to blaze a trail for Japan’s diplomatic power. China and Korea aside, perhaps, the world’s view of Japan is almost unilaterally positive — the popularity of manga, anime, cozy lit, magical cleaning methods, matcha and more are proof of that, all representing gentle alternatives to and escapes from an increasingly dystopian America. Things like “rearming” are the literal antithesis to cozy lit.

So Japan’s success as a cultural superpower is based in large part on good vibes. Interestingly, you can say the same for Takaichi herself. For all of her charisma, all of the promises to “make things happen,” she hasn’t actually done much of note yet, policy-wise. That could well change now that she has her mandate. But not everyone believes she really does. Writing for The Guardian, Karin Kaneko frames her victory as less about politics than prices, while Wada Ikeda, writing for Asia-Pacific Journal, ties it to a “credibility collapse” on the part of legacy media that fuels extreme online voices. And the Asahi noted that the sudden nature of the elections prevented many from voting, particularly those living abroad.

Whatever the case, Takaichi will inevitably face the same conundrum on a personal scale that nations do on a global one. For now, she’s a cool lady who drums to K-pop songs. But the moment the claws come out, the bubble of soft power she’s so cannily cultivated for herself may start to deflate.