Japan’s Prime Minister (PM) Sanae Takaichi has said that she felt “a little lonely” after her staff removed a cockroach from her official residence, where she had allowed it to remain because of her belief in reincarnation.
Takaichi, who moved into the residence in central Tokyo in December, shared the incident in a series of posts on X while answering questions about the building, which is known for stories about alleged ghost sightings.
She said that she had never encountered a ghost at the residence but had recently seen a cockroach run past her feet despite taking steps to keep the house clean.
Takaichi said that her reluctance to kill the insect was influenced by Osamu Tezuka’s Firebird manga, which explores the idea of reincarnation.
“Maybe because of that, even now as an adult, I can’t bring myself to kill insects, cockroaches included,” she wrote.
She said that she initially waited for the cockroach to leave on its own, thinking it could be “part of that long cycle of reincarnation”.
However, when she informed her secretaries, one of them decided to deal with the problem, telling her: “It’s unclean. I’ll handle it.”
The staff then arranged what Takaichi described as “Operation Combat”, after which she said that the cockroaches stopped appearing.
“I felt relieved, but also a little lonely, or maybe sad,” she wrote.
In the same series of posts, Takaichi explained that she preferred working from the official residence rather than the prime minister’s office because it reduced the burden on staff and security personnel.
“I have made it a point to actively utilise the prime minister’s residence, which allows me to minimise the number of staff and security personnel, including special police, who need to be involved,” she wrote on X.
Takaichi, 65, became Japan’s first female prime minister and is known for working long hours, including on weekends. She has previously spoken about sleeping only a few hours a night since taking office.
In July, she posted that she had finally managed to get five hours of sleep after regularly getting between zero and three hours.
