By Tim Kelly and Joseph Campbell
TOKYO, Feb 4 (Reuters) – The handbag she carries is sold out, her pink pen has gone viral and even her favourite snacks are in hot demand: Japan’s 64-year-old leader Sanae Takaichi has sparked an unlikely youth-led craze that could propel her to a big election win.
Polls suggest ‘sanakatsu’, roughly translated as ‘sanamania’, can help give Japan’s first female prime minister a decisive mandate in Sunday’s general election and unleash the spending plans she has promised will jolt the country’s moribund economy.
Backed by her personal popularity, her ruling coalition could capture as many as 300 seats in the 465-seat lower house, polls this week showed, a remarkable turnaround given her predecessor resigned after losing control of both chambers in ballots over the last 15 months.
What’s perhaps even more surprising is the appeal of the staunchly conservative leader with voters under 30, estimated by one recent poll at over 90%. Her overall popularity stands at around 60%.
Takanori Kobayashi, director at Hamano, the company that makes the $900 black leather bag that Takaichi regularly totes, says he has been stunned by the young people clamouring to buy the item on a nine-month backlog.
“The bag is usually bought by people in their forties or fifties,” Kobayashi said at the company’s factory in Nagano, central Japan, where press clippings of the prime minister are pinned to a notice board.
“But since it became well known, probably through social media, we have seen a lot of interest from customers in their twenties and thirties.”
There has been a similar online buzz around the pink ballpoint pen she uses to scribble notes in parliament and the shrimp rice crackers she was seen clutching while riding a train.
SOCIAL MEDIA SAVVY
Takaichi has built a social media following that dwarfs those of her rivals, both inside her ruling Liberal Democratic Party and across the opposition. She has about 2.6 million followers on X, compared with around 64,000 for Yoshihiko Noda, leader of the main opposition party.
Takaichi’s personal approval ratings are almost double that of the LDP, traditionally a male-dominated party, according to a poll released on Monday by public broadcaster NHK.
Her viral posts stand out in Japan’s usually staid politics, such as clips of her drumming to the hit song Golden from Netflix’s K-Pop Demon Hunters with South Korean President Lee Jae-myung, or serenading Italy’s Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni with ‘Happy Birthday’ in Italian.
When Takaichi announced the snap poll on January 19, she cast the vote as a de facto referendum on her leadership and policies, including fiscal expansion and a plans to strengthen defences to counter China’s growing military might.
“Can you entrust the management of the nation to Sanae Takaichi? I ask the people directly to judge,” she said.
She surprised voters and politicians with an election “to get an endorsement in a way that is actually rather presidential,” said Koichi Nakano, a political science professor at Sophia University in Tokyo.
Takaichi’s approach has won over Haruka Okuyama, a 32-year-old office worker who attended her first campaign rally in Akihabara, an anime and gaming culture hub in central Tokyo.
“A lot of young people follow social media these days, and I think there’s been an increase in conservative thinking among them,” Okuyama said, pulling a magazine from her bag that she said she bought because Takaichi was on the cover.
Perched atop a campaign truck outside Akihabara station, Takaichi spoke about her modest upbringing outside Japan’s political elite, and covered topics from the cost of hair salons to controlling immigration.
Takaichi, whose mother was a police officer and father worked at a car company, has said she has drawn inspiration from Margaret Thatcher, the daughter of a shopkeeper who became Britain’s first female and longest-serving modern premier.
“She has a clear, decisive way of speaking,” said Takeo Fujimura, a 24-year-old clerical worker who had volunteered to hand out paper Japanese flags at the event. “She communicates in a bright, positive way and I think that energy resonates with young people.”
‘POWER OF PERSONALITY’
Not everyone at the rally had made up their mind.
Tomomi Kawamura, a 37-year old housewife, said she admired Takaichi’s social media savvy, but was undecided on who to vote for. Rising prices were her main worry, she said, echoing concerns among other voters that the yen’s slide – triggered in part by Takaichi’s promised fiscal largesse – is fuelling inflation.
“Prices are so high,” Kawamura said. “I want something done about that.”
Some analysts question whether enough of the youth the prime minister has attracted will turn out to deliver the landslide that polls predict she will win on Sunday. Younger people have historically been less likely to vote than older generations that have underpinned the LDP’s near unbroken post-war rule.
But even a modest win would underline how her personal appeal has single-handedly revived the fortunes of a party whose long grip on power was slipping fast, said David Boling, a principal at The Asia Group, a strategic advisory firm .
“The power of her personality seems to be transcending politics,” he said.
($1 = 155.4800 yen)
(Reporting by Tim Kelly and Joseph Campbell; Additional reporting by Tom Bateman and Sophia Kisa Eaton; Editing by John Geddie and Raju Gopalakrishnan)
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