Japanese Prime Minister's fear of cockroaches

Ms. Sanae Takaichi, 65, Japan's first female Prime Minister, has revealed details about her solitary life and work routine at her official residence through several social media posts. Representing the ruling Liberal Democratic Party, she moved into the official residence in Tokyo last December and has now been in office for 10 months.

She is known for working long hours on weekends and at night, and for getting very little sleep.

During her tenure, Ms. Takaichi, who remained unwavering in the face of world leaders like Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin, maintains close ties with Donald Trump and Giorgia Meloni. She refers to American President Trump as one of her closest friends and typically gets only zero to three hours of sleep per day. However, in a post on her X account last July, she mentioned that she had gotten five hours of sleep for the first time in a long while.

In response to public questions regarding reports that she spends time at the official residence, missing parliamentary sessions, she described her experiences. The Prime Minister refuted claims of ghosts in the official residence, instead sharing an incident where she encountered a cockroach there. Despite maintaining strict cleanliness by cleaning under the dining table and storing food in lidded containers, one day a cockroach walked past her feet.

Since childhood, she was accustomed to frequently reading Osamu Tezuka's manga series "Firebird". Due to the concepts of reincarnation and the cycle of rebirth (samsara) in that story, she disliked killing animals. Thinking of this cockroach as part of the same cycle of rebirth, she patiently waited for it to leave.

However, upon learning of this incident, her secretaries were shocked by the uncleanliness and took steps to remove the cockroach through a special operation. After that, the cockroaches stopped appearing, and while she felt relieved about it, the Prime Minister also mentioned feeling a certain degree of loneliness and sadness.

She prioritizes working from the official residence rather than the Prime Minister's office to ease the burden on security officers and staff by minimizing their involvement. Even when personal meetings are required, she arranges for only the relevant secretary or essential officials to be brought to the official residence.

According to the Nikkei newspaper, since her appointment, she has spent more than half of her weekends and public holidays at the official residence. Bloomberg reports indicate that she has also held the fewest cabinet meetings since 2012. Meanwhile, her husband (a former politician), who suffered a stroke in February 2025, handles the cooking at home.

Despite securing a resounding victory in the snap general election held last February, her popularity dropped by 10 percentage points to 41 percent in a poll conducted last month. Prioritizing the continuation of the Japanese imperial succession, which is limited to male members of the royal family, and delaying policies to control rising commodity prices have contributed to this decline in popularity.