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Japan, that’s why Sanae Takaichi, candidate for prime minister, doesn’t like feminists

She could become Japan’s first female prime minister: Sanae Takaichi, 60, is backed by former prime minister Shinzo Abe, who resigned due to health problems. At the moment, women represent less than 15% of the parliament and only two of the 21 ministers of the current government are women. And according to the annual World Economic Forum on gender gaps, Japan, the world’s third largest economy, ranks 120th out of 156 countries.

Yet the idea of ​​Sanae Takaichi being elected, even if it would be a historically significant step, does not really appeal to those Japanese and Japanese who advocate the emancipation of women.

A hard-line conservative, she rarely cares about equality gender and, indeed, supports some policies they would like further reduce women’s rights, such as the law requiring wives to use their husband’s surname. According to her, who is divorced, changing this rule could increase divorces or extramarital affairs. Takaichi also opposes same-sex marriage and changes in the law that would allow women to reign as empresses. Like Shinzo Abe and other conservatives, he also argues that Japanese atrocities during World War II were overrated.

In his speech this month in the conservative magazine Bungei Shunjū, he spoke neither about gender equality, nor about other rights. Instead, he preferred to pose emphasis on its economic policy, which aims to raise inflation by 2% through “bold monetary easing”, “flexible fiscal stimulus” and “investments”.

Women struggle to gain ground in Japanese politics, particularly at the national level. According to analysts, they must necessarily be right-wing to gain political weight. “To compensate for the disadvantage of being a woman, you have to show excessive loyalty to conservatives», He explained to New York Times Mari Miura, professor of political science at Tokyo’s Sophia University. “And that means that you must be anti-feminist».

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