Japan's new PM Yoshihide Suga appoints same old men and fewer women

Japan’s governing party resisted any urge to pick a magnetic crowd-pleaser when it anointed Yoshihide Suga as its leader this week. As Parliament officially elected him prime minister Wednesday, he repaid its support.

Suga, 71, put forward an everyone-old-is-new-again Cabinet dominated by ministers who will continue in the jobs they held under Shinzo Abe, who resigned as prime minister late last month because of ill health. The sea of familiar faces sent an unmistakable signal that Suga intends to make good on his vow to carry on with Abe’s signature policies.

But it also seemed to shut the door on one of them: a pledge — though a largely unfulfilled one — to empower women. The number of women in the Cabinet will actually decline to two from three. Both of them held the same posts in the previous administration.

Above all, Suga’s status quo Cabinet, as well as his appointments of key party leaders, suggested that he was rewarding those who had helped him become prime minister, which was orchestrated by factions within his conservative Liberal Democratic Party.

In important positions, Suga kept Taro Aso, a former prime minister and one of the party’s kingmakers, as finance minister and Toshimitsu Motegi, Japan’s most senior diplomat, as foreign minister. And in moving Taro Kono, the defense minister and a former foreign minister, to the ministry of administrative reform, Suga gave the defence portfolio to Nobuo Kishi, Abe’s younger brother.

On the issue of women in the Cabinet, Suga’s failure to increase their numbers, some analysts said, reflected the fact that there are simply not enough women in the Liberal Democratic Party overall. Ten per cent of party lawmakers are women, and Suga gave ministerial roles to two of them: Yoko Kamikawa, the justice minister, and Seiko Hashimoto, the minister for the Olympics.

But others say that Suga and the Liberal Democrats are simply not committed to gender equality, even after the passage of a law two years ago promoting gender parity in politics.

In selecting Suga, Abe’s longtime chief Cabinet secretary and main government spokesman, the party showed its confidence that it did not need to cater to the public by choosing a flashy frontman to help win future general elections. Part of the party’s calculation as it considers the possibility of a near-term general election is that the opposition is in disarray.