Last October, Sanae Takaichi became Japan’s Prime Minister after being elected as head of the Liberal Democratic Party, the conservative political party that has governed Japan for most of its postwar history. And on Sunday, after calling a snap election last month, she secured a supermajority in Japan’s lower house of parliament, giving her significant power to increase both military and domestic spending, push a harder line against China, and pursue a more restrictive immigration policy. Like Margaret Thatcher, whom she frequently invokes, Takaichi is her country’s first female Prime Minister, and she is operating in a largely male-dominated political system. She has already received strong support from President Trump, whom she will likely pressure to maintain a hawkish stance against China.

I recently spoke by phone with Andrew Gordon, a professor of modern Japanese history at Harvard, about the significance of the election. During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed what Takaichi’s landslide victory will mean for Japan’s relationship with China, the changes that have pushed Japanese politics rightward in recent decades, and how this election fits into the broader narrative of rising global populism.

Does this election feel significant in the context of postwar Japanese politics?

The scale of the L.D.P. victory is unprecedented since the Second World War. It marks the first time a party has secured a supermajority on its own. And it is especially impressive in the context of the last thirty years, when there’s been some degree of parity between the L.D.P. and the opposition. The 2005 election, where Junichiro Koizumi led the L.D.P. to a major victory, was also a large margin, but this was bigger.

The other thing that’s notable is that there’s a stereotype, which I think has many kernels of truth to it, that Japanese politics is not heavily driven by personality. And a lot of the politicians who have been Prime Minister, and led the L.D.P. or other parties, haven’t done so with a lot of charisma. But Takaichi’s victory seemed to be largely driven by the surprising spike in the popularity of the Prime Minister. So that’s pretty unusual. The Koizumi election is the closest analogy I can think of, because of his persona. He had this rapid-fire way of speaking in short sentences, bluntly and clearly, that seemed to attract people, and he successfully made the election a referendum on him as much as on policy.

But that is really unusual. I was in Japan from October through part of January. And the gap between Takaichi’s popularity and her party’s popularity seemed to be either as high or higher than it has ever been between a Prime Minister and their party. Usually, the popularity levels of the Prime Minister and the party are close. And sometimes the Prime Minister’s popularity is underwater compared to the party. So the big question was whether Takaichi could individually raise the profile and increase support for the L.D.P. And she succeeded.

Do you think it is helpful to view Takaichi’s success through the prism of right-wing nationalism’s rise across the world?

There is no question that it is absolutely part of the story. And the surprising success of the far-right Sanseito Party in last summer’s House of Councillors election, which determines the makeup of the upper house of parliament, seemed to come from their xenophobic, hard-line, anti-immigrant, anti-foreigner attitude, which is of a piece with what we see not only in this country, but in a growing number of countries. So it seemed pretty clear that the L.D.P. was going to try to move in that direction and to co-opt that support for the far right, which is a political strategy the L.D.P. has been very good at in the past. They will shift their own policies in the direction of the new sentiment among voters, and in both right and left directions. The best case for the other direction was in the nineteen-seventies and nineteen-eighties, when environmental protection was very popular on the political left and left-of-center, and the L.D.P. moved in that direction effectively and co-opted that. But they are moving right now, especially on immigration.

The other major issue is the economy and inflation. And although it’s hard to trust that anyone has a good answer for reducing the inflation of the past three or so years, including the L.D.P., nobody else seemed to have a convincing case of what they were going to do. So voters seemed to say, “O.K., well, this new person, let’s give her a chance.”

Well, increased nationalism and hostility to immigrants, combined with concern about inflation, is obviously a widespread political reality. But, in this case, the Party that benefitted is the largest and most successful Party in postwar Japan, whereas in other countries, you have had older, more established parties struggle.

Right. Although, the other aspect of Takaichi’s rise that doesn’t exactly fit into the worldwide rightward drift is her hawkishness. As we see in the United States, much of that rightward drift has been isolationist.

We’ll see about that, but go on.

Yes, it may not have turned out that way here in the U.S. But it is interesting how readily Takaichi has been willing to provoke China. Last year, in response to a question from a member of parliament, she stated that the Japanese government would act in defense of Taiwan in the case of a Chinese attack. Her answer is a departure in terms of how publicly it was stated. I think what she meant to say, which also would have been provocative, was that Japan would defend Taiwan because it has an alliance with the United States, who, of course, would be involved. Her answer amounted to saying we would stand with the United States, but that was left implicit. So it was a very provocative statement, even though nobody really knows what the United States will do these days, because Takaichi could have, if she wanted to, signalled to the Chinese government not to fool around with Taiwan through a back channel and easily avoided all of this fuss. But, because she said it publicly in the national legislature, it led the Chinese to respond with fury.

The Chinese government reacted by telling Chinese citizens not to travel to Japan, threatening economic retaliation, and pulling the plug on meetings that were long planned, putting a pretty deep freeze on China-Japan relations. So, to many people, including some people in the Japanese Foreign Ministry whom I talked to, Takaichi’s answer was a terrible mistake and the sign of an amateur.

However, even though I’m not sure how calculated it was, her anti-China stance seems to have done well with the public. There’s a lot of fear of China in Japan, economically and militarily, and, even though people understand there’s interdependence between the two countries, Takaichi is seen as being willing to stand up to China, which inspires a kind of nationalism. So, her hawkishness does fit the nationalism narrative.

Japan struggled for a long time with deflation and, in fact, welcomed the surge in global inflation in the earlier part of this decade. Now, it seems like the Japanese electorate is tired of it. My understanding is that, despite Takaichi’s reputation as being on the right, at least in an American context, her economic policies include heavy government spending. I know some of it is on the military side, but how do you understand her economic policies from an ideological standpoint?

I think that her economic policies are within a realm of normalcy, unlike perhaps the United States today. She’s not looking to fight inflation by raising tariffs or something like that. But what’s strange is that the government got part of what it wanted, when deflation ended and prices started going up, but what it really wanted was for wages and incomes to be going up as well. And the thought was that, with the Bank of Japan keeping interest rates negative, you can give people more money through greater pay increases. But inflation ended up outpacing those increases.

The puzzle to me is that, as far as I can tell, what Takaichi is promising to do isn’t necessarily going to keep prices down. She’s talking about what she calls an aggressive financial policy, which actually means the return of low or negative interest rates and easy money, so it’s the opposite of fighting inflation. And then big increases in military spending. It’s hard to see what is anti-inflationary in what she proposes.

I was talking to a friend who has travelled to Japan regularly, and he told me that he was quite worried about things like the intimidation of immigrants and the erosion of press freedom, which has included the government threatening to cancel broadcast licenses of TV stations that are critical of the L.D.P. I said that my perception was that Japan’s institutions were perhaps stronger than they are in the United States, and could resist such things. He responded that he thought those institutions had rarely been tested in the past, because they depended on the idea that the L.D.P. historically divided up its control of institutions between different factions, so you don’t have the same centralized control that you would have in a more authoritarian setup. But he was concerned that could be coming to an end because of Takaichi’s popularity and centralized control of the L.D.P.

Your friend is right about how the L.D.P. historically functioned. The question is whether Takaichi’s victory will give her such a lock over the Party and its actions that they’ll go along with policies that will be controversial with the public. Your friend could be right. There’s a possibility that Takaichi is going to move very aggressively. I think she will on some military-spending plans.

But will she go after opponents in a Trumpish way? I don’t think so. And I also don’t think her anti-immigrant moves will be the same as Trump’s. First of all, there are very few undocumented immigrants in Japan, so even the most aggressive policy toward foreigners isn’t so much going to be rounding people up and sending them home as shutting the doors to more people coming, and perhaps making life more difficult for foreigners who are in Japan in terms of access to social services and things like that. But you’re not going to see the type of scenes that we see in the U.S.

What were some of the differences among L.D.P. factions?

One issue has always been about Japan’s history, and whether you see Japan as a country that has something to apologize for in its conduct during the Second World War. The L.D.P. has shifted toward a policy of denial that Japan has any need to keep apologizing, but not entirely. There remains a portion of the L.D.P. that resists that idea. But Takaichi has considered the Second World War a war of survival and of self-defense, which is a view that’s held on the Japanese right wing. So that’s one place where I think a divide in civil society and some divide in the Party was a check on the hawkish wing. Prime Minister Shinzo Abe was going to make a statement on the seventieth anniversary of the end of the Second World War in 2015, and there was a lot of fear that he was going to disavow any contrition or apology or self-reflection. And in the end, he didn’t do that. You can quibble, and I do quibble with some of the things Abe said, but he responded to a combination of foreign and domestic pressure and did something that I think fell short of what he would have liked to say in his heart. Will Takaichi feel constrained in that regard? I think she might, because international relations matter, and the last thing she needs now is a huge fight with South Korea.

I think Trump has given a boost to Japan’s relations with South Korea, and probably made her less likely to pick a fight on the history issue with South Korea.

How so?

Because Japan and South Korea both have to deal with this unpredictable President who may or may not defend them. So it’s in their interest to be buddies.

Despite the fact that South Korea is obviously, for very understandable reasons, suspicious about Japanese nationalism.

Yes, it is, but I think they have a lot of economic interdependence and, in terms of security and military issues, there’s a lot of ties that bind the two countries together, especially when the U.S. is seen as an unreliable partner.

I hear what you are saying about the ways Takaichi may be constrained. But my understanding is that when she was communications minister of the L.D.P. about a decade ago, press freedom in Japan declined. And I know that there are incidents in her past, like posing for a photograph with a neo-Nazi politician and blurbing a book that was euphemistic about Hitler. Do you think these authoritarian leanings are a core part of who she is?

For a young politician to rise in the Party, you need a patron. Many politicians are children of members of the legislature, and they’ve got family ties and somebody to nurture and protect them. But she didn’t. She comes from a family with no political background or connection. In that sense, she raised herself up. So she had to attach herself to somebody, and she decided that Prime Minister Abe was the person to attach herself to earlier in her career. And he nurtured and brought her along and allowed her profile to rise. And so, maybe there is an opportunistic aspect to her early political decisions.

But at the moment, these positions don’t strike me as a pose. Her nationalism, her view on the Second World War, her concerns about immigrants—all of this strikes me as pretty deeply felt, and it’s become, I think, a core part of her identity and also of her base. So does that mean she’s going to go full bore in imposing things that are going to be really controversial, both at home and with Japan’s neighbors, especially China and Korea? Not necessarily. Abe, too, suppressed his core ideological convictions. Not completely, but to some extent, because he was also a pragmatist.

Do you see the hawkishness of some members of the L.D.P. toward China as a continued expression of the Second World War-era nationalism, or do you see it as something newer, spurred by China’s position as a rising power?

I absolutely see it as newer. I don’t think the ideas that motivated Japan’s invasion of China and the atrocities committed in the Second World War are the primary factors. It has to do with the sense that China is a rising military power that might threaten Taiwan, is allies with North Korea, and is acting aggressively. The anti-Chinese feeling in Japan today is, I think, almost entirely related to China’s international activities, economically and militarily.

Takaichi is also the first female Japanese Prime Minister. How important was that to her campaign, and how important does it seem to you that Japan has elected a woman?

That is not how she defines herself. The fact that she’s the first Japanese Prime Minister, who happens to be a woman, is not something she’s putting front and center, and her own views are basically anti-feminist. But it’s been interesting to see a divide among Japanese women, with some saying, “It’s great that a woman has gotten to this level because this will be an inspiration to other women.” And others who say, “No, you’ve got to look at what somebody says and does and not who their identity is.” And so has inspired a kind of anti-identitarian feminist push from some people.

She styles herself on Margaret Thatcher, and it’s clear that to rise in the L.D.P., there is no way you could rise as a feminist. She had to win the support of the old male guard, and Abe and the older politicians like him were dead set against doing things that feminists want. For instance, one very controversial current issue is whether women can keep their original names, the names they’re born with, after getting married.

At the moment, the answer is no. And Takaichi agrees with that. A married couple can only have one family name legally. The husband can take the wife’s name or the wife can take the husband’s name, but only one family name. Women can do it informally. In the academic world, a number of female scholars, even after they marry, continue to use their maiden name professionally. But legally speaking, for a passport, for any government activities, that’s not their name.

To go back to the importance of this election, from everything you’ve said, it seems like there are ways in which Takaichi represents something new, but you don’t see her rise as some sort of fundamental break with the politics of postwar Japan.

Yeah. I think that in the context of Japanese politics, this is a very unusual result and a rightward tilt, but the L.D.P. has tilted right in the past. So it’s not a profound rupture with the existing mode of Japanese politics. It’s just a strong shift in a direction that, in many ways, things were already moving toward.

It is also important to note that the L.D.P. remains a minority party in the upper house. This will be somewhat of a check on the Party. I say somewhat because the House of Councillors is a weaker body than the lower house, and it is possible for the government to pass a budget that the lower house supports, even if the upper house does not approve it. But revising the constitution, specifically Article 9, which much of the L.D.P. dislikes, and which essentially outlaws Japan from waging war, requires a two-thirds vote in each body. Then a majority of voters must approve it in a referendum. So although the L.D.P. win will certainly bring the idea of revision into play, I see no chance for it to actually happen until the L.D.P. secures a comparable majority in the Councillors. The next election of that body is not until 2028, and only half the members stand for reëlection each time.

So there are reasons for caution and doubt about how aggressively she could transform things. ♦