Like their distant cousins in Dublin’s Phoenix Park, the roaming deer of Nara are a beloved tourist attraction.
About 1,450 mingle freely with visitors to Japan’s old capital city, where they are considered a sacred national treasure.
So claims by the politician set to become Japan’s first female prime minister that foreigners are abusing the animals have caused fury.
In a speech launching her bid to lead the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) last month, Sanae Takaichi accused tourists of “kicking” the deer.
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People from abroad “strike them, they frighten them,” she said, “deliberately trying to harm the things Japanese people treasure. If foreigners take pleasure in trampling on the feelings of the Japanese, then something must be done”"
Media commentators said Takaichi (64) was pandering to xenophobia. Reporters dispatched to Nara to probe her claims could not substantiate them. Workers in Nara Park said they had not seen anyone harming the deer.
Some speculated that Takaichi was triggered by a notorious YouTuber who had built an online career falsely accusing Chinese tourists of bullying the animals.
Yet, the speech, pushing anti-immigration to the front of Japanese politics, seems to have paid off. On Saturday, Takaichi beat her four rival candidates in a party election to become the new LDP leader.
If confirmed by Japan’s National Diet this month, she will replace outgoing prime minister Shigeru Ishiba, who has taken the blame for two election defeats that has left the government in a minority in both houses.
Takaichi’s followers angrily reject her liberal media framing as a nationalist pit-bull (her predecessor, Kishida Fumio reportedly nicknamed her “Taliban Takaichi”), but few could deny that her policy proposals lean right.
[ Resignation of Japanese prime minister Shigeru Ishiba sparks race for successionOpens in new window ]
Like her political heroine Margaret Thatcher, she supports robust military spending – and legal changes that would allow Japan to attack enemy military bases.
In common with her protege, Shinzo Abe, who was assassinated in 2022, she seeks to scrap Article 9, the so-called pacifist clause of the constitution, and to remake Japan’s Self-Defence Forces into a formal army.
She says she would create a law punishing people who damage the Japanese flag. Her book, Toward a Beautiful, Strong, Growing Nation, lauds the splendour of the Japanese people and their DNA, unchanged for millennia.
More problematically for Japan’s perennially touchy ties with its neighbours China and South Korea, Takaichi rejects what conservatives in Japan call “apology diplomacy” for its misdeeds there during the second-world war, and strongly supports political pilgrimages to Yasukuni Shrine, which secretly enshrined the men who led the war in the 1940s.
For most ordinary Japanese, such views, which have been part of the DNA of Takaichi’s party since 1955, matter far less than bread and butter issues. Voters have long tolerated the LDP’s ideological obsessions, and corruption, because of its deft economic stewardship. But as it has lost its footing in recent years, symbolised by falling wages and rising rice prices, some voters have been siphoned off by the right.
Rival party Sanseito, which won 14 seats in July’s general election, campaigned against a “silent invasion” of foreigners, and proudly carries the banner of Japanese Trumpism. All five candidates in the LDP race said the government must get tougher to stem the tide of foreigners, amid concerns about over-tourism, crime and bad behaviour.
Non-Japanese, mostly Chinese, Vietnamese and Koreans, make up about 3 per cent of Japan’s population but some estimates say that could reach 10 per cent by 2070. The government has projected, meanwhile, that 40 million tourists will have visited by the end of this year, adding to the sense among some in a traditionally homogenous country that they are being swamped.
Takaichi’s nod to the populist right over how to respond to such changes reflects the party’s internal debates as it struggles with swooning support.
“People don’t know what the LDP stands for anymore,” she said in a speech during the campaign. “That sense of urgency drove me. I wanted to turn people’s anxieties about their daily lives and the future into hope.”
Yet, with Japan’s population falling by a record 900,000 last year, scapegoating foreigners, who already do countless low-level tasks, is a risky strategy.
A lot will be riding on the new prime minister’s macro-economic policies, which seem to be a return to high fiscal spending, tax cuts and cheap borrowing. As Abenomics, the formula was rejected by Kishida when he was prime minister in 2021-24.
The LDP’s coalition partner, the Buddhist-backed Komeito, has hinted it might desert the government if Takaichi does not rein in her more extreme positions. That would leave the party scrambling for help, probably with Sanseito. Takichi won the leadership with votes from party members and lawmakers, representing less than 0.24 per cent of the population.
Her first job will be convincing a sceptical public that she can govern.
