The spouse of Japan’s first woman Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi hopes to support her by being a “stealth husband”, cooking meals but staying out of the spotlight.
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AFP reports: “Unlike in the West, it is better for a partner to stay out of the spotlight,” Fukui Television quoted Taku Yamamoto, 73, as saying on Tuesday after Takaichi became premier.
He said it was essential that Takaichi, who won the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) leadership this month, can “pursue her vision of Prime Minister”.
“I want to provide solid support as ‘a stealth husband’ to ensure that my presence does not become an obstacle to that,” he added, according to the Asahi newspaper, Fuji Television and other media.
Yamamoto, a former LDP lawmaker, married Takaichi in 2004, but the couple divorced in 2017 citing “differences in political views”.
They re-married in 2021, after Yamamoto reportedly supported Takaichi when she ran unsuccessfully for the LDP leadership contest that year. In the subsequent snap election he lost his seat.
Licence to cook
Takaichi’s views on gender place the 64-year-old on the right of an already conservative LDP.
She named only two other women to her cabinet, with Satsuki Katayama as finance minister and Kimi Onoda as economic security minister.
Takaichi 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.
This is despite the difficulties that the law has given the couple.
During Takaichi and Yamamoto’s first marriage, she took his name for official purposes. In the second, he took hers.
They live in a housing complex for members of parliament in Tokyo, where Takaichi helps care for Yamamoto after he suffered a stroke this year and was also diagnosed with prostate cancer in 2024, reports said.
Media reports said that he first proposed to Takaichi in 2004 over the phone.
He told her that “as I have a chef’s licence, I’ll make sure you eat delicious food throughout your life,” Jiji Press reported.
Takaichi, an admirer of Margaret Thatcher and a heavy metal drummer in her youth, said that he “was a rather unsociable person, someone I would say I wasn’t very comfortable to be with.”
But he won her over, saying “if you’re seriously looking for a marriage partner, I’m divorced so I’ll run as a candidate,” Takaichi said on her website.
Takaichi had lost her parliamentary seat in 2003 but regained it two years later, so both of them became parliament members.
Since Takaichi was not good at cooking, he continued to prepare meals, saying, “the kitchen is my domain, so please don’t enter,” Jiji said.