Lunch with the FT: Akie Abe

By David Pilling

A few days after I had lunch with Akie Abe, the near-celebrity wife of Japan’s prime minister attended a private dinner with George and Laura Bush at the White House. The president, enthralled with Japan’s First Lady, gushed: “Thank you for bringing your gracious wife to dinner. The prime minister married very well. I was so impressed by Akie’s compassion and her intelligence.” Addressing the uncomfortable-looking Japanese leader by his first name, he added: “I will tell you, Shinzo, Laura feels like she has a new friend now. And so do I.”

Akki-chan, as Japanese weekly magazines have christened her (the diminutive “chan” is also used for pets and Hello Kitty), has outshone her husband since he became prime minister last September. While Shinzo has struggled to step from the mop-haired shadow cast by Junichiro Koizumi, his flamboyant predecessor, Akie has slipped more easily into the limelight.

Previous Japanese First Ladies may not have walked three paces behind their husband, but none of them exactly hogged centre stage. Akie, by contrast, has been the subject of countless glossy profiles, which portray her as a modern young woman – she was 45 last month – unafraid of expressing her emotions, even passions.

She is known for her devotion to South Korea’s dreamy soap stars, her weakness for a tipple, and her habit of holding her husband’s hand on state occasions; the Japanese equivalent of George giving Laura a French kiss on the White House lawn. (Now erase that thought.) She has talked openly about the couple’s childlessness, and posts a teenage-style blog, Akie Abe’s Smile Talk.

Akie had asked to meet me at a restaurant on the 45th floor of the Ritz-Carlton hotel, the latest palace of luxury to puncture Tokyo’s skyline. I arrive early, inadvertently provoking a whispered discussion among hotel staff worried about protocol: should I await my guest in the bird’s-eye lobby or greet her at ground level? We head downstairs. The attendants are still debating etiquette when Akie herself, oblivious to our little huddle, sweeps past and we clip along after her. On the elevator ride back up she politely ignores me, apparently unaware that I am her FT lunch partner.

Trotting a few paces behind, I gain a First Lady perspective on the world: a blur of bowed heads, nervous smiles, mannered greetings. In the private room, laid with luscious green tatami, we swap cards and sit at a low table. She makes no acknowledgement of our previous misunderstanding. Perhaps it is I who misunderstood.

My first impression is that Akie, dressed in a sober but fashionable grey pinstriped skirt and jacket, is not the easygoing character of repute. She is nervous. She speaks in a small, song-bird voice and bites her lip, her sentences trailing off or ending in self-conscious laughter. Only the three-stringed shamisen music breaks the ensuing silence.

A nervous young waitress arrives in a pink kimono. She lowers her head to the tatami and, hands trembling, offers us hot towels. Just then, Akie’s stomach rumbles loudly. To her credit, Akie acknowledges the gurgling and bursts into laughter. She does not cover her mouth with her hand.

As we try the appetiser, clam in sesame paste – as with many high-class restaurants, there is no choice of menu – I ask how life has changed since her husband became prime minister. “The biggest difference is that we’ve moved to the official residence and that, when I go out, everyone knows me. There are some tense moments when I meet the wives of heads of state. But it’s not a drastic, difficult transition.”

Akie, the daughter of a sweet company magnate, must have known what she was getting into when she accepted an invitation to an omiai – an arranged introduction – with Shinzo Abe, a man whose uncle and grandfather had both been prime minister. Four years after they married, Abe’s father died and Shinzo took over the family seat in distant Yamaguchi prefecture. It was only a matter of time before he became prime minister. “I have been training myself up for this role,” she says.

She is slurping her clear soup now, trying to finish before my next question. I want to know if she is being used to soften the stuffed-shirt image of her husband, who this month is fighting upper house elections that could even dislodge him prematurely from office. “The truth is, he is a really interesting person with a great sense of humour, but the only face he shows in public is very formal,” she says. “If standing beside him softens the image, that is one of the roles I should be playing.”

One problem, she says, is that her husband became prime minister earlier than expected. “He did not have to fight for this position, to struggle for it. He felt he lacked the preparation to be prime minister.”

The waitress has been fluttering, waiting to introduce our next course, a simmered lily root dumpling. Akie suffers rather than relishes the requirement to campaign on her husband’s behalf. “I can’t say it’s something I exactly enjoy. But it’s a bit like a sport. When we win, we reward ourselves with a tasty beer.”

This seems like an excuse to broach the subject of her partiality for alcohol, a contrast to her husband’s near-teetotalism. “Everyone around me knows that I like to drink,” she says. “When we moved to Yamaguchi, I didn’t have relations or friends, so alcohol played a big role in getting me closer to supporters by relaxing the atmosphere. I find alcohol to be an effective tool.”

Warming to the subject, she continues. “I like Japanese sake, but recently I have had the chance to drink really good wine. When I went to China we were served Maotai, very strong alcohol. I was told no matter how much I drank I wouldn’t get a hangover. The weekly magazines wrote: ‘Maotai juppai [10 glasses of Maotai].’ That was an exaggeration.”

We talk a little about her attraction to South Korea, a country also known for its fiery alcohol. How does she view the controversy over so-called “comfort women”, the young women, many Korean, forced to work in Japanese wartime brothels? Her husband had recently got into hot water by suggesting that Japan’s Imperial Army was not directly responsible. “I don’t want to say much about this,” she says, reaching for an answer clearly scripted by advisers. ”Many things went on under the circumstances of war and I feel very sorry for those women who had to become comfort women.”

As we set about the delicacies in our exquisitely arranged two-tiered bento lunch box, I ask whether western stereotypes about subservient Japanese women are true. “When I was working [at an advertising agency] it was common for women to work a few years and then quit as soon as they got married. I didn’t have any particular skills or a career I wanted to pursue. I just wanted to get married and start a happy family.”

Her voice is more lilting and relaxed now. “Nowadays almost every woman goes to college and some hope to continue working even after having a child. But things remain difficult inside companies. Less able men tend to get promoted over women. So some women go to foreign companies or move to foreign countries.” That is a waste of talent, she says. “We have pioneer women in Japanese society, but men’s mindsets have to change. Some of them are still feudalistic.”

Isn’t her husband’s party, which has dominated power for half a century, responsible? Only recently, the prime minister himself stuck by Hakuo Yanagisawa, health minister, who had referred to women as (under-performing) “baby-making machines”.

“I think the analogy that Yanagisawa-san used was a slip,” she says. “His wife is an artist and a university professor. She is independent and has her own opinions. If Yanagisawa-san really thought in that old-fashioned way, he would have made her quit her job and support his election campaign. I think he used the word ‘machine’ by accident.”

The waitress shuffles in again, bringing tea to pour over our rice and sashimi. The lives of Japanese men and women, I say, strike me as being more separate than unequal. The career-track salaryman is expected to show more devotion to his corporate family than to his wife and children. “What do they say?” answers Akie, half-jokingly. “’A good husband is healthy and never at home.’”

Does she share all her husband’s beliefs? “I didn’t have strong ideas to begin with and perhaps for the past 20 years I have been brainwashed,” she jokes. “I am not a politician. I go [to rallies] as a politician’s wife, in support of my husband. In that respect, what I believe is irrelevant.”

Yet she clearly feels at ease with her husband’s mission of restoring pride to a Japan that conservatives feel has for too long festered in wartime guilt. “He has a goal of creating a ‘beautiful Japan’. That can be about the environment, about our treasured Japanese traditions and culture and arts, or about the beautiful spirit of the Japanese people. Since Japan has become an economic power, we have begun to realise what we have lost.”

We are eating dessert now, a delicate cherry blossom tofu in a thick molasses sauce sprinkled with gold leaf. Akie says she sought advice on being a First Lady from Cherie Blair and Laura Bush. But something from Junichiro Koizumi, the bachelor prime minister, also stuck. “He told me: ‘Every day as prime minister is hard, so when he comes home give him a big hug.’”

That would be the most traditional of “stand-by-your-man” sentiments were it not for her impulse to add an explanation. “Perhaps there was no one to give Koizumi-san a hug back then,” she says in nudge-nudge fashion, referring to the former prime minister’s legendary celibacy while in office. “But I think he’s having lots of fun now,” she adds saucily, throwing her head back and exploding into laughter.

David Pilling is the FT’s Tokyo bureau chief

Hinokizaka, Ritz-Carlton, Tokyo

2 x clam in a white sesame paste

2 x clear soup

2 x sashimi: fatty tuna, white fish

2 x simmered lily root dumpling

2 x bento box

2 x rice porridge with sea bream

2 x cherry blossom tofu

2 x green tea

Total: Y30,700 (￡125)