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Nevin Al Sukari - Sana'a - Japan’s Prime Minister and President of the Liberal Democratic Party Sanae Takaichi raises her fist in response to the audience at the end of her campaign speech for the House of Representatives election in Tokyo on January 27, 2026. — AFP pic
TOKYO, Jan 28 — The proportion of women running in Japan’s general election next month has barely advanced, reports said today, despite a trailblazing win last year by Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi.
Takaichi, a staunch conservative who admires Margaret Thatcher and took the helm in October, has shown little appetite for framing her leadership around gender and named a male-dominated cabinet despite pledging to boost female representation.
Although a record 24 per cent of the 1,285 lower house candidates who kicked off their campaigns yesterday were women, according to the Asahi Shimbun and other media, the figure is just one percentage point up on the last general election.
The government set a goal in 2020 for 35 per cent of the candidates for parliament’s powerful lower house to be women by 2025. A new target has yet to be announced.
“The inauguration of Prime Minister Takaichi doesn’t appear to have sparked a strong movement within the LDP (Liberal Democratic Party) to significantly increase the number of female candidates,” Yuki Tsuji, professor of Tokai University and politics expert, told AFP.
The proportion of women candidates within Takaichi’s ruling LDP is just 12.8 per cent, down by more than three percentage points since the last election, Jiji Press reported.
Meanwhile, the opposition isn’t highlighting the presence of women and diverse candidates as a party advantage, Tsuji said.
But she also noted that the sudden dissolution of parliament by Takaichi last week for the February 8 election “left little time to carefully select and field candidates” and could be “the main reason why the number of female candidates hasn’t grown much”.
The party with the highest proportion of women is Sanseito — a small but fast-growing party pledging “Japanese first” polices — which has 82 women among 190 candidates, around 43 per cent, according to Jiji Press.
Despite promising “Nordic” levels of representation in her government, Takaichi named just two other women in her 19-strong cabinet.
In Japanese politics and boardrooms, women are rare. The country ranked 118 out of 148 in the World Economic Forum’s 2025 Gender Gap Report.
Nordic nations Iceland, Finland and Norway occupied the top three places.
Takaichi’s views on gender place her on the right of an already conservative LDP, and she opposes revising a 19th-century law requiring married couples to share the same surname, a rule that overwhelmingly results in women taking their husband’s name.
Yu Uchiyama, political science professor of the University of Tokyo, said that “Takaichi is so famous for her conservative stance that it is unlikely that she will devote her energies to such policies” like promoting DEI (diversity, equality, and inclusion). — AFP
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