TOKYO: Tinker, tailor, soldier, sailor, pharmacist, tax accountant, bus driver, chef. Name the profession, and Japan is likely to be running perilously low on its practitioners – not just to the point of inconvenience, but to somewhere a little more existential.

So while there is much to welcome in the ruling Liberal Democratic Party’s election of Sanae Takaichi as both its new leader and (we may reasonably assume) the country’s first female prime minister, it is hard not to see some cruelty in the selection. 

Her route to power has been set out by inflation, by the deep discomfort it is causing a nation and by her predecessor’s failure to address it. To survive, Takaichi must somehow create public comfort with rising prices while inheriting an economy grappling with the “enshortification” of everything.

After 70 years of nearly unbroken power, the LDP is low on new ideas, and the country is paying the price for many old ones that did not work. More unsolvable than that, though, are decades of adverse demography, the simultaneous ripening of related crises and the increasingly unmissable shrinkage of the workforce. 

Those realities leave anyone taking over at this juncture as likely to fail – on multiple fronts, and in ways that their predecessors were larg...