Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi said she felt “a little lonely, or maybe sad” after her secretaries removed cockroaches from the official residence in Tokyo.
The 65-year-old leader shared the story on X on August 22 while answering questions about the nearly century-old brick building. She has never seen the ghosts long linked to the site of two failed coup attempts in the 1930s. She has, however, screamed at the sight of cockroaches.
“I’ve never encountered a ghost, but until recently, I was the one screaming when I came across cockroaches,” Takaichi wrote. She lived for years in parliamentary dormitories without seeing any. After moving into the official residence in December 2025, she kept the place carefully clean. She wiped the floor under the dining table, stored food scraps in a sturdy lidded can, and washed and sorted plastic containers. One day a cockroach still scurried past her feet. The sight shocked her.
She could not bring herself to kill it. From childhood she has loved Osamu Tezuka’s manga Phoenix, also known as Firebird or Hi no Tori. The series explores reincarnation and the idea that life continues while changing forms. “Maybe because of that, even now as an adult, I can’t bring myself to kill insects, cockroaches included,” she wrote. Looking at the insect in the residence, she thought it too might belong to that long cycle. For a while she simply waited, hoping it would leave on its own.
When she finally told her secretaries, they were appalled. “It’s unclean. I’ll handle it,” one said firmly. The staff arranged what Takaichi called “Operation Combat,” using insect poison around the building. The cockroaches stopped appearing. “I felt relieved, but also a little lonely, or maybe sad,” she wrote.
Takaichi, born March 7, 1961, in Yamatokōriyama, Nara Prefecture, became Japan’s first female prime minister on October 21, 2025, after winning the Liberal Democratic Party leadership contest. She is the first woman to hold the post and the first from Nara. Her father worked for an automotive company. Her mother served in the prefectural police. She graduated from Kobe University in 1984 with a degree in business administration, after long daily commutes her parents required. She later studied at the Matsushita Institute of Government and Management, worked as a congressional fellow in the United States, and entered the House of Representatives in 1993. She has held multiple cabinet posts under Shinzo Abe and Fumio Kishida, including internal affairs and economic security.
In the same series of posts she explained why she spends so much time at the official residence next to the Prime Minister’s Office. She treats it as a workplace. Meetings and document review happen there at odd hours. Staying put reduces the burden on security officers who would otherwise accompany her on every outing. The residence dates to 1929. Earlier prime ministers sometimes joked about its haunted reputation after the May 15 Incident of 1932 and the February 26 Incident of 1936.
The cockroach story spread quickly across Japanese and international media. Many readers found the contrast striking: the country’s first female prime minister, known for a demanding work schedule and conservative views, admitting a soft spot for an insect she could not harm. Takaichi’s X account, which she uses frequently to communicate policy and personal notes, carried the post in Japanese. Translations and screenshots circulated widely in the days that followed.
Tezuka’s Phoenix, left unfinished at his death in 1989, remains one of the most philosophically ambitious works in manga. Its recurring theme of life connected across forms clearly stayed with Takaichi from childhood into the highest office in Japan. The secretaries, focused on hygiene in the official residence, took a more practical view. The result left their boss both relieved and a little wistful.
