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This is your perennial reminder that Japan’s Minister of State for Special Missions (Child Policy, Youth Empowerment, Declining Birth Rate, Gender Equality) looked like this.
Alright, she did when she was much younger. Today, she’s 61 years old and has a penchant for the pants suit.
She became a politician in 2010. Despite having no children of her own (though she’s had some practice — she’s on her third husband, who is 24 years her junior, since 2016), she was tasked with reversing Japan’s chronically declining birth rate.
Mihara started off her career as a singer. When she was an actress, she did a nude scene in at least one movie, Sagano Inn (1987), a Nikkatsu softcore porn (sexploitation) movie.
She released several photo books in the 1980s, including a full-frontal nude (“hair nude”) one in 1987, before it became really popular and common for female celebrities to do, and then another one in 1994 (when the vogue was in full force), this time shot in black and white by erotic master Nobuyoshi Araki.
Around this time, in the late 1980s and into the 1990s, she also competed quite successfully in auto racing (her first husband was a racing driver). Quite a woman.
Whenever we see a news headline about Japan’s struggling demographic problem, we like to check her old pictures and think of who’s in charge of fixing things and inspiring men to start families.
At least, she was in charge until the end of the Ishiba government in October 2025. After his rival, Sanae Takaichi, took over, Mihara was unceremoniously dropped and replaced by Hitoshi Kikawada, which presumably shows how serious the current government is about tackling the demographic crisis.
Mihara was preceded by a younger woman.
Ayuko Kato (pictured) is in her forties and has two kids with another LDP politician Kensuke Miyazaki, though they divorced (after which she went into politics, possibly to spite her ex), only for him to marry another female lawmaker, Megumi Kaneko, and he received a lot of positive media attention for becoming the first member of the House of Representatives to take paternity leave when Kaneko was pregnant. There was just one problem: Miyazaki was having an affair while Kaneko was pregnant and in the hospital — with a gravure idol, no less! Now that’s what we call setting an example. He subsequently resigned his seat (though stayed married to Kaneko).
All this goes to show that things get messy when politicians try to get involved with raising the birthrate, either directly or through policy!
