Takaichi's 'charisma' can't overcome effects of gravity of reality

Last autumn, when Sanae Takaichi became Japan's first female prime minister, her rise carried something close to an electric charge. Her approval rating initially topped 70 percent. Her long-cultivated image as a conservative star seemed to promise a new chapter in Japanese politics.

But barely a year later, a poll of 1,000 women by Shukan Josei Prime, or Women's Weekly, ranked her the "third worst prime minister in history". Her approval ratings had already been falling for weeks before that. The latest poll's sample may be modest, but the symbolism is hard to miss. A politician who once seemed to embody change is now confronting something much less glamorous: gravity.

What punctured Takaichi's political honeymoon? She appears to have assumed that charisma could substitute for fiscal arithmetic, historical honesty and diplomatic realism. It cannot. Reality, like gravity, never takes a holiday.

The Takaichi government has pursued Japan's largest postwar military buildup while promising sweeping tax relief, including a proposed reduction in the consumption tax on food from 8 percent to 1 percent from April 2027. For households squeezed by rising prices, that sounds attractive. But Japan already carries the heaviest public debt burden among advanced economies, while its population is aging, its workforce is shrinking and domestic demand remains fragile. With Fiscal Year 2027 budget requests exceeding 130 trillion yen ($832 billion) and military spending reaching a record 8.9 trillion yen, the arithmetic is becoming increasingly difficult to disguise.

The contradiction is that a government cannot indefinitely promise both guns and tax cuts without explaining who will pay the bill. And voters are noticing. A reported 71.7 percent of respondents expressed concern about Japan's fiscal health.

Yet the more revealing problem lies beyond the balance sheet. Takaichi has embraced a hard-line security posture, describing China as an unprecedented strategic challenge and repeatedly injecting the Taiwan question into Japan's security debate. Her eagerness to align with Washington may win applause in Western capitals, but it risks reducing Japan's diplomacy to that of a Washington-pleaser while making relations with its Asian neighbors more brittle and undermining regional peace and stability.

On Saturday, Takaichi demanded that Russia remove a monument commemorating the Soviet victory over militarist Japan, saying it was "completely unacceptable" and hurt the sentiments of the Japanese people. Japan's Foreign Ministry echoed her complaint.

The monument depicts a Soviet Red Army soldier smashing a boundary marker modeled on one erected by the Japanese military on Sakhalin Island, or Kuye Island. The chrysanthemum emblem on the marker evokes not merely imperial tradition but the state that launched wars of aggression across Asia.

Russia's response was blunt. Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said Takaichi's demand was akin to asking "the wind to stop blowing and the sun to stop shining", stressing that Russia's history rests on facts and that its memory is preserved in monuments.

Takaichi's demand exposes Tokyo's uncomfortable double standard. Japan wants Russia to erase a monument commemorating the defeat of Japanese militarism while Japan itself continues to preserve sites that are deeply entangled with its militarist past.

Consider the Hakko Ichiu Tower, erected in 1940 under the slogan appropriated by Japanese militarists to justify imperial expansion. Or the notorious Yasukuni Shrine, where 14 convicted Class-A war criminals remain enshrined. Or the continuing controversies surrounding the commemoration of Japan's wartime conduct and the treatment of sites associated with forced labor.

History cannot be curated like a tourist brochure, with defeat removed from one page and imperial glory preserved on another. This matters because historical revisionism and military expansion are not separate phenomena. A nation that "sanitizes" the past can more easily romanticize the policies that produced it. And a government that invokes wounded "national sentiment" whenever others recall Japan's wartime defeat should perhaps pause to consider the sentiments of the tens of millions who suffered under Japanese militarism across Asia.

Takaichi's problem, then, is larger than one monument or one poll. She is discovering the limits of personal charisma. Military spending cannot solve demographic decline. Tax cuts cannot erase debt. Diplomatic alignment cannot substitute for regional trust. And no amount of official indignation can make inconvenient history disappear.

Charisma can open the door to power. It cannot repeal arithmetic or rewrite history.

The real test for Takaichi — and for Japan — is whether the country can finally look at its militarist past without nostalgia, its finances without illusion and its neighborhood without confrontation. Otherwise, the shadows of history will remain not because others refuse to forget, but because Japan has never fully learned what it should remember.