Sanae Takaichi won her snap election based on a smile and lacquered promises. Japan’s first female prime minister, we were told, would be outspoken and open-minded and — why not? — caring. A fresh breeze through the stale corridors of male, gray-suited rigidity.

And then, barely had the confetti settled than she began “creating an environment” to visit the Yasukuni Shrine.

Creating an environment. It sounds like she’s redecorating. Throw pillows. A little incense. Perhaps a playlist called “Militarism, but Make It Mindful”.

But Yasukuni is no spa. It is a shrine that honors, among 2.5 million war dead, 14 convicted Class-A war criminals from World War II. For China and much of Asia, it is not a memorial site, but “a spiritual tool and symbol of Japanese militarists’ war of aggression”, as Beijing has described it.

The issue, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Lin Jian said this week, is whether Japan can “rightly perceive and deeply reflect on its history of militarist aggression”. Amnesia of history, he warned, “means betrayal”.

This year marks the 80th anniversary of the Tokyo Trials. In most countries, that would be a cue for solemn remembrance. In Tokyo, it appears to be a branding opportunity.

Takaichi’s coalition — the Liberal Democratic Party and the Japan Innovation Party — now holds 352 lower house seats, a two-thirds supermajority that places constitutional revision within tantalizing reach. The upper house is trickier, but ambition has never been in short supply in the LDP’s right wing. Article 9, the pacifist clause renouncing war and prohibiting “land, sea, and air forces”, has long been a burr under conservative saddles. It has been reinterpreted to allow Self-Defense Forces; the dream is to give them explicit constitutional legitimacy.

The prime minister did not specify which articles she wants to amend. She didn’t need to. The shrine is the subtext.

Her defenders say she is merely honoring the dead. Critics in Asia see something else: an effort to normalize what previous leaders handled with exquisite caution, if at all. “Creating an environment” is political code — test the waters, widen the Overton Window, make the unthinkable banal.

Meanwhile, Takaichi’s domestic economic script reads like populist kabuki. She vows to suspend the consumption tax on food for two years, promising it “will not rely on special deficit-financing bonds”, even as bond markets squint nervously. The economy has limped through stagnation and demographic decline, yet the real energy of her campaign has not been economic rescue but nationalist revival.

Image matters. Takaichi’s ascent shattered a gender barrier in a country that ranks poorly on female political representation. The optics are potent: a sharp contrast to the stereotype of rigid male predecessors. But breaking a glass ceiling is not the same as breaking with ideology.

To Beijing, the Yasukuni overture and the Taiwan rhetoric are not isolated gaffes but symptoms of a government leveraging the specter of “external threats” — to expand Japan’s strategic role while cloaking it in the rhetoric of peace and stability.

Consider Tokyo’s expressed willingness to purchase US weapons for Ukraine. It is framed as solidarity. But it is also geopolitics: helping Washington ease the strain in its security ties with European allies after public spats over Greenland and military spending burden-sharing. Japan is presenting itself as the model ally, buying hardware, projecting virtue and reinforcing its claim to a louder security voice.

Peace with procurement.

None of this erases Japan’s postwar achievements: seven decades of prosperity under a pacifist constitution, a reputation for restraint a deep integration into global institutions. That legacy is precisely what makes Yasukuni visits so combustible. The shrine is a litmus test of whether Tokyo’s leadership understands that history in East Asia is not archival — it is alive.

Takaichi’s smiling pragmatism masks a high-stakes wager. She has harnessed popularity — and the novelty of her gender — to consolidate power in the lower house. Now she is advancing toward constitutional revision and historical revisionism at once. The risk is not only diplomatic friction with Beijing or Seoul. It is that Japan’s hard-won postwar identity becomes collateral damage in a nationalist renaissance.

In a region where memory is long and mistrust longer, symbolism can spark storms. Japan’s first female prime minister has a chance to redefine leadership. The question is whether she will redefine it forward — or backward.

“Creating an environment” is easy rhetoric. Living in the environment you create is harder.