Sanae Takaichi

Biography

Sanae Takaichi was born in Nara Prefecture on 7 March 1961; her father worked for a Toyota-affiliated firm and her mother served in the prefectural police. She commuted long hours to study business administration at Kobe University, graduating in 1984, and then entered the Matsushita Institute of Government and Management. In 1987 she went to Washington as a congressional fellow working for the Democratic congresswoman Patricia Schroeder, and after returning to Japan she wrote about American politics and worked as a television presenter for TV Asahi and Fuji Television.

She was elected to the House of Representatives as an independent for Nara in 1993, moved through the New Frontier Party and joined the Liberal Democratic Party in 1996. She was out of the House between 2003 and 2005. A protégé of Shinzo Abe, she held several state minister posts in his first cabinet, including Okinawa affairs and science and technology policy, and was twice Minister for Internal Affairs and Communications, from 2014 to 2017 and from 2019 to 2020. Under Fumio Kishida she was Minister of State for Economic Security from 2022 to 2024.

She ran for the LDP presidency in 2021, finishing third, and in 2024, when she led the first round but lost the run-off to Shigeru Ishiba. On her third attempt, in October 2025, she won, and after forming a coalition with the Japan Innovation Party she was elected by the Diet on 21 October 2025 as Japan's first woman prime minister. Her remarks on a possible Chinese attack on Taiwan set off a diplomatic crisis with China, and the snap general election she called in February 2026 gave the LDP a two-thirds majority. She holds conservative positions on defence, constitutional revision and imperial succession.