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TOKYO: In a country that ranks poorly internationally for gender equality, the new president of Japan’s long-governing Liberal Democrats, and likely next prime minister, is an ultra-conservative star of a male-dominated party that critics call an obstacle to women’s advancement.
Sanae Takaichi, 64. admires former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and is a proponent of former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s conservative vision for Japan.
Takaichi is the first female president of Japan’s predominantly male ruling party that has dominated Japan’s postwar politics almost without interruption.
She hardly touched on gender issues during the campaign, but on Saturday, as she tried out the party president’s chair and posed for a photo as is customary for the newly elected leader, Takaichi said: ”Now that the LDP has its first female president, its scenery will change a little.”
First elected to parliament from her hometown of Nara in 1993, she has served in key party and government posts, including minister of economic security, internal affairs and gender equality.
Female lawmakers in the conservative Liberal Democratic Party who were given limited ministerial posts have often been shunned as soon as they spoke up about diversity and gender equality. Takaichi has stuck with old-fashioned views favored by male party heavyweights.
Takaichi also admits she is a workaholic who would rather study at home instead of socializing. After unsuccessfully running for party presidency twice in the past, she made efforts to be more sociable to build connections as advised, she said.
But on Saturday, as she called for an all-out effort to rebuild the party and regain public support, she asked all party lawmakers to “work like a horse.” Then she added, “I will abandon the word ‘work-life balance.’ I will work, work, work and work.”
The “work-life balance” quickly trended on social media, triggering mixed reactions — support for her enthusiasm and concern about her work ethic.
Women comprise only about 15 percent of Japan’s lower house, the more powerful of the two parliamentary chambers. Only two of Japan’s 47 prefectural governors are women.
A drummer in a heavy-metal band and a motorbike rider as a student, Takaichi has called for a stronger military, more fiscal spending for growth, promotion of nuclear fusion, cybersecurity and tougher policies on immigration.
She vowed to drastically increase female ministers in her government. But experts say she might actually set back women’s advancement because as leader she would have to show loyalty to influential male heavyweights. If not, she risks a short-lived leadership.
Takaichi has backed financial support for women’s health and fertility treatment as part of the LDP policy of having women serve in their traditional roles of being good mothers and wives. But she also recently acknowledged her struggles with menopausal symptoms and stressed the need to educate men about female health to help women at school and work.
Takaichi supports the imperial family’s male-only succession, opposes same-sex marriage and a revision to the 19th-century civil law that would allow separate surnames for married couples so that women don’t get pressured into abandoning theirs.
She is a wartime history revisionist and China hawk. She regularly visits Yasukuni Shrine, which Japan’s neighbors consider a symbol of militarism, though she has declined to say what she would do as prime minister.
Political watchers say her revisionist views of Japan’s wartime history may complicate ties with Beijing and Seoul.
Her hawkish stance is also a worry for the LDP’s longtime partnership with Komeito, a Buddhist-backed moderate party. While she has said the current coalition is crucial for her party, she says she is open to working with far-right groups.

WASHINGTON: Nearly 80 years after Mao Zedong called the United States a “paper tiger” to boost morale at home, US President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin are exchanging barbs who is the paper tiger of today.
In a Sept. 23 post on Truth Social, Trump mocked Russia’s military powers and called the country “a paper tiger,” prompting the Kremlin to push back. Trump backed off, but on Tuesday he brought back the dismissive rhetoric when addressing a roomful of generals and admirals. “You’re four years fighting a war that should have taken a week,” Trump said of Russia’s war with Ukraine. “Are you a paper tiger?”
On Thursday, Putin retorted, “We are fighting against the entire bloc of NATO, and we keep moving, keep advancing and feel confident, and we are a paper tiger; what NATO itself is?”
He added: “A paper tiger? Go and deal with this paper tiger then.”

Those familiar with modern Chinese history have found it amusing, odd and not without irony that an American president should be using a classic Chinese propaganda slogan — words that came from the heart of a communist government that is the polar opposite of what the Trump administration frames as the best way to run a country.
“As a Chinese historian I had to laugh at the irony when President Trump appropriated one of Chairman Mao’s favorite expressions in calling Russia a ‘paper tiger,’” said John Delury, a senior fellow at Asia Society.
“Mao famously said this about the United States, at a time when the US had a growing nuclear arsenal and China was not yet a nuclear power. ... How times have changed. Now the leaders of the United States and Russia are calling one another ‘paper tigers’ as Chinese leader Xi Jinping sits back looking like the adult in the room.”
How paper tiger became a propaganda term in China
The phrase — “zhilaohu” in China’s dominant dialect — is well-rooted in the culture of the Chinese Communist Party. Perry Link, a well-known American scholar on modern Chinese language and culture, recalled that Lao She, a famous Chinese writer, referred to US troops as the “paper tiger” during the Korean War years.
“There’s a Cold War echo across this whole story,” said Rana Mitter, a British historian specializing in modern Chinese history.
Accounts by Chinese state media and essays by party theorists say the phrase entered into the party vocabulary when Mao, the founding revolutionary, told the American journalist Anna Louise Strong in a 1946 interview that the atom bomb by the United States was a “paper tiger,” which the “US reactionaries use to scare people.”

Mao then used the Chinese phrase “zhilaohu,” which means paper tiger literally. But his interpreter translated it into “scarecrow,” according to state media reports, before an American doctor who was present suggested “paper tiger,” which Mao approved. The phrase largely refers to something that is seemingly powerful but actually fragile.
Delury said at the time that Moscow, which took the nuclear threat seriously, was aghast that Mao “casually” dismissed the threat and was annoyed that “Mao would brazenly use ‘paper tiger’ rhetoric at a time when if nuclear war broke out, China would rely on Russian involvement.”
The term became ‘a sharp thought weapon’ for China
That didn’t happen. Mao seized power in 1949, and the phrase “zhilaohu” became a propaganda staple in communist China, closely associated with western imperialists, particularly the United States. Mao famously said that “all reactionaries are paper tigers.” In canonizing the leader’s wisdom, party theorists have called the slogan Mao’s “strategic thought” and “a sharp thought weapon.”
The rhetoric subsided when US-China ties warmed in the 1970s, but it resurfaced in recent years as bilateral relations chilled.
In April, in the heat of a tariff war between the two countries, a Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson posted on X a Mao quotation from 1964: “The US intimidates certain countries, stopping them from doing business with us. But America is just a paper tiger. Don’t believe its bluff. One poke, and it’ll burst.”
Before Trump borrowed Beijing’s propaganda slogan to mock Russia, the phrase had already seeped into the public discourse in the United States. In a February editorial, Eugene Robinson, a Washington Post columnist, criticized Trump’s foreign policy and compared it to bullying. “Trump’s foreign policy is that of a paper tiger, not a real one,” wrote the columnist, now retired.
And in May, Laurence Tribe, a Harvard University professor, called Trump “a paper tiger” when assuring Harvard’s international students not to be scared by the president’s hostile policy toward foreign students.