Japanese Prime Minister shares her experience with cockroach

Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi

TOKYO: Japan’s Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi has revealed an unusually personal episode from life inside the country’s historic official residence: she was more frightened by a cockroach than by the ghosts the building is famously rumoured to harbour.

In a series of posts on X on August 22, Takaichi responded to questions she said she frequently receives about the residence, known in Japan as the “kotei.” Among them was the inevitable question: “Have you already met the ghosts that are said to appear in the official residence?”

Her answer was simple: no ghosts so far.

Cockroaches, however, were another matter.

“I’ve never encountered a ghost, but until recently, I was the one screaming when I came across cockroaches,” Takaichi wrote.

The revelation came as the prime minister offered a glimpse into the less formal side of her life at the residence, where she has increasingly spent long stretches working. The 1929 brick-and-stone building has a particularly grim history: it was associated with two violent coup attempts in the 1930s and has consequently acquired a reputation for being haunted.

Yet Takaichi said the supernatural had never troubled her. An insect did.

She explained that she had been careful about keeping the residence clean. She wiped the floor beneath the dining table, sealed food waste in a sturdy bin and washed and sorted plastic containers. So when a cockroach suddenly darted across her feet, she said she was genuinely shocked.

But killing it was not an option for her.

Takaichi connected her reluctance to a childhood love of Osamu Tezuka’s Phoenix, a manga centred on themes of life, death and reincarnation. She suggested that those ideas had stayed with her into adulthood.

“Maybe this life is also part of that long cycle of reincarnation,” she recalled thinking as she encountered the unwanted visitor.

Rather than eliminate the insect herself, she waited, hoping it would eventually disappear.

That strategy ended when one of her secretaries discovered what was happening.

“For a while, I endured it, hoping it would somehow leave on its own—but when I told my secretaries about it, they were appalled,” Takaichi wrote. “‘It’s unclean. I’ll handle it,’ one of the secretaries said firmly, and arranged for Operation Combat.”

The operation appears to have worked. Takaichi said she did not see another cockroach after her staff intervened.

And then came the twist.

Relief was not the only emotion she experienced.

“I felt relieved, but also a little lonely, or maybe sad…” she wrote.

The anecdote has attracted attention partly because it contrasts sharply with the image of Japan’s prime minister as an intensely disciplined political leader. Takaichi has defended spending considerable time at the official residence, saying she treats it not simply as a home but as an extension of her workplace. Its proximity to the prime minister’s office allows her to work without a commute and respond quickly in an emergency, while also reducing the burden on security officers who accompany her when she travels.

Her working habits have themselves become a subject of public discussion. Takaichi has previously said she sometimes sleeps only “zero to three” hours a night, citing the combined demands of running the government and managing household responsibilities.

Against that backdrop, the cockroach story takes on a strangely human dimension.

For a prime minister living and working for long hours in a nearly century-old residence, the unwanted creature apparently became more than just a pest. Takaichi never claimed it was a friend, but after allowing it to remain rather than kill it, its sudden disappearance left behind an unexpected sense of absence.

The building may still have its ghost stories. But for Takaichi, the most memorable resident so far was apparently a cockroach — and, oddly enough, she missed it when it was gone.

*Background: Japan’s House of Representatives confirms Takaichi, born March 7, 1961, as prime minister and identifies her as a Liberal Democratic Party member and 11-term representative from Nara’s second district. *