For many years, Japan’s current Prime Minister Takaichi Sanae has been portrayed by international media as the heir to Abe Shinzo’s political legacy. Her nationalist views, assertive security posture, and close ties to Japan’s conservative movement have made the comparison seem natural. 

There is good reason for the comparison. As Michael Green recently argued in Foreign Affairs, Takaichi has continued an important part of Abe’s strategic legacy: strengthening Japan’s defense capabilities, deepening the Japan-U.S. alliance, and responding more assertively to the challenge posed by China. From this perspective, Takaichi represents the continuation of a strategy that seeks to make Japan a stronger and more indispensable U.S. ally.

But strategic continuity should not be confused with political continuity. After roughly 10 months in power, the differences between Takaichi and Abe are becoming increasingly difficult to ignore. Rather than simply reviving “Abe politics,” Takaichi appears to be developing a new political style of her own: more personalized, more confrontational, and more dependent on emotional mobilization through social media. If Abe represented a conservative politics tempered by strategic pragmatism, Takaichi may represent something closer to a new form of conservative populism. 

In other words, Takaichi may be Abe’s heir in grand strategy, but she is not necessarily adopting his tactics. The political methods emerging from Takaichi’s camp suggest a significant change in how Japan’s conservatives seek to mobilize domestic public support. 

The controversy over the use of artificial intelligence (AI) during the 2025 Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) leadership election and the 2026 House of Representatives election offers a revealing example. Shukan Bunshun, a Japanese weekly magazine known for exposing political scandals, recently reported that people close to Takaichi’s camp had used AI to produce large numbers of short videos attacking political opponents and circulated them widely online. The revelations triggered a public backlash and created the first serious political challenge of Takaichi’s premiership.

The use of digital technology for political campaigning is hardly unprecedented. What is more significant is how the technology appears to have been used: not simply to communicate policy positions or mobilize supporters, but to amplify political antagonism and shape voters’ emotions. During the Abe era, the prime minister’s office was highly sophisticated in managing the media and political narrative, but Abe generally maintained a clearer distinction between political messaging and outright mobilization through antagonism.

Takaichi’s political operation appears more willing to blur that boundary. This is particularly important because Takaichi has cultivated a direct relationship with voters through social media. Rather than relying primarily on Japan’s established media organizations, she uses X to communicate directly with the public. 

According to the Financial Times, Japanese business leaders have become increasingly frustrated with what they see as Takaichi’s unwillingness to listen to views from outside her political circle. They are also concerned that she has become increasingly hostile toward the mainstream media while relying more heavily on social media to maintain her popularity. This approach may be politically effective in the short term. But it also carries potential risks. Social media rewards confrontation, immediacy, and emotional intensity. A political leader who relies heavily on such platforms can easily find herself governing through the logic of mobilization rather than the logic of consensus-building.

A second concern is the uncertainty surrounding Takaichi’s decision-making. In April, the Japanese magazine Sentaku reported that Takaichi had clashed with Imai Nobuya, a senior political adviser during the Abe era, over the possible deployment of the Self-Defense Forces (SDF) to the Middle East. According to the report, Imai opposed Takaichi’s reported intention to send Japanese forces to the Strait of Hormuz to support U.S. military operations against Iran. 

The details of the episode remain disputed, and the report should therefore be treated with caution. But the broader question it raises is difficult to dismiss: Does Takaichi have the same capacity for institutional and strategic balancing that characterized Abe’s leadership?

Abe was undoubtedly a committed conservative. Yet he was also an unusually pragmatic political operator. He relied heavily on trusted bureaucrats and political advisers, and he understood the importance of reconciling political ideology with institutional constraints and strategic realities. On major security and foreign policy questions, his administration typically sought to balance competing interests before making consequential decisions. 

Takaichi’s approach appears more personal. Her foreign policy positions are often closely associated with her own ideological convictions, and she has shown less evidence of the cautious political calibration that was one of Abe’s defining characteristics.

Nowhere is this difference more consequential than in relations with China. Abe is frequently described outside Japan as a China hawk. That description is not entirely wrong, but it misses an important and delicate part of his diplomacy. Despite his nationalist reputation, Abe repeatedly demonstrated an ability to separate ideological commitments from strategic interests. In April 2018, for example, according to a memoir written by a Taiwanese political figure, Abe declined to meet former Taiwanese President Lee Teng-hui, who was staying at the same hotel in Okinawa, apparently to avoid unnecessarily provoking Beijing. 

In 2019, Abe also sent a private letter to Yasukuni Shrine exploring the possibility of removing the enshrined Class-A war criminals, an effort that would have reduced one of the most persistent sources of friction in Japan’s relations with its neighbors. (I learned of this episode in 2025 while interviewing Kitaoka Shinichi, one of Abe’s key foreign policy advisers, at Stanford University.) 

Whatever one thinks of Abe’s broader political legacy, these episodes demonstrate that his conservatism was accompanied by a strong instinct for strategic risk management. He understood that nationalist symbolism could generate domestic political benefits while imposing substantial diplomatic costs.

Takaichi has yet to demonstrate the same degree of restraint. Her approach to China appears to be driven more directly by ideological convictions and political instincts than by a broader strategy for managing Japan’s long-term relationship with its most important neighboring power. 

This is precisely where the distinction between Takaichi and Abe becomes most important. Abe sought to strengthen Japan’s alliance with the United States while simultaneously maintaining channels for stable relations with China. His foreign policy was not simply “tough” or “soft”; it was fundamentally about strategic management.

If Takaichi is indeed continuing Abe’s grand strategy by strengthening the Japan-U.S. alliance and making Japan more capable of confronting China, that does not necessarily mean that she is reproducing Abe’s broader approach to statecraft. Abe’s strategic vision depended not only on strengthening Japan’s position, but also on managing the risks created by that stronger position.

Even some of the architects of Abe’s foreign policy now appear concerned about the direction of Japanese diplomacy. On July 2, Yachi Shotaro, the former head of Japan’s National Security Secretariat, wrote in his Nikkei series “My Life History” that the most important challenge facing Japanese diplomacy in the 21st century is its relationship with China. Japan, he argued, must think over the medium and long term about how to build a stable and strategic relationship with China while remaining a U.S. ally and recognizing China as an important neighboring country.

Yachi is hardly a dove on China. After Abe returned to power in 2006, he played a central role in efforts to improve China-Japan relations. According to interview records cited in journalist Funabashi Yoichi’s 2024 book on politics during the Abe era, “Children of Destiny,” Yachi also accompanied former Prime Minister Fukuda Yasuo to China in 2014 and helped facilitate the resumption of China-Japan summit diplomacy. 

His remarks therefore reveal something important about the Abe-era foreign-policy establishment. Its members may have supported a stronger Japan and a more robust alliance with Washington, but they also understood that strategic competition with China could not substitute for diplomacy. For them, managing the relationship with Beijing was an essential component of Japanese diplomatic statecraft.

Takaichi’s politics appear to place greater emphasis on confrontation. That difference may ultimately determine whether her premiership can endure. A June poll by Jiji Press put Takaichi’s approval rating at roughly 54 percent, down from around 70 percent at the beginning of the year. For a prime minister who has not yet fully consolidated her political authority, this is hardly an unassailable position. A major scandal, economic setback, or diplomatic crisis could quickly weaken her support.

Takaichi may share Abe’s nationalism, his skepticism toward the postwar liberal order, and his determination to strengthen Japan’s security posture. She may also continue many of the strategic policies that Michael Green and other scholars have associated with Abe’s legacy. But political inheritance is about more than policy positions. It is also about governing instincts.

Abe understood that conservative politics could be sustained only by combining ideology with pragmatism, nationalism with diplomacy, and political mobilization with institutional management. Takaichi appears to be experimenting with a different formula – one that places greater emphasis on personal leadership, social media politics, emotional mobilization, and confrontation with perceived political and cultural opponents.

That does not necessarily mean Takaichi will fail. Indeed, such a political style may prove highly effective in an era of fragmented media and growing public distrust of established institutions. Nor does it mean that Takaichi’s foreign policy is fundamentally incompatible with Abe’s. On the contrary, she may succeed in making Japan an even stronger U.S. ally. But a stronger Japan and a more predictable Japan are not necessarily the same thing.

U.S. policymakers should recognize that Japan is entering a new political era. The question of whether Takaichi is Abe’s successor is ultimately a distraction. What matters is whether she can turn her personalized style of conservative politics into an effective governing system. If she can, Japan’s conservatives may have found a new political formula – one that combines strategic nationalism with populist mobilization and direct communication with voters. If she cannot, the same forces that made Takaichi powerful could also make her government increasingly unstable and expose Japan to unnecessary security risks.