New opposition head, half-Taiwanese Renho, inches closer to Japan's top job

TOKYO The nation's top opposition party, the Democratic Party, has chosen Renho, a 48-year-old former model and anchorwoman, as its new leader. In doing so, three things have happened.

First, the opposition has finally found a leader with the star power to match the popular Prime Minister Shinzo Abe. Secondly, this means that the three politicians with the strongest chance to succeed Abe, if he does step down as required in the fall of 2018, are all women, namely Tomomi Inada, the right-wing defense minister who is widely considered Abe's preferred successor; Yuriko Koike, who recently won a landslide victory to become Tokyo governor; and Renho.

Thirdly, it places the half-Taiwanese Renho an election away from becoming Japan's prime minister.

Born to a Taiwanese father and Japanese mother in Tokyo, Renho has always gone by her first name only, a highly unusual practice in Japan. The reluctance to use her full name, Renho Murata, through her marriage to a Japanese journalist has made conservatives grimace, and question her allegiance to the country.

In interviews, she has said that "while my citizenship is Japanese, my identity is Taiwanese." She has given her twin children, a girl and a boy, Chinese-sounding names: Suiran and Rin.

During the party election campaign, conservative media broke news that Renho still maintained dual citizenship with Taiwan, which Japanese law prohibits.

When questioned on a TV program in early September, Renho stated that she had rescinded her Taiwanese citizenship and chose to be Japanese when she was 18. Days later, she backtracked in a press conference by saying, "When I was 17, together with my father I took procedures to abandon my Taiwanese citizenship." But she added that she couldn't speak the Taiwanese language, so could not follow exactly how her father had made the arrangements with the official.

In mid-September, Renho received notice from Taiwan's representative office in Tokyo that her Taiwanese citizenship was in fact, still valid.

ASTOUNDING VICTORIES Nevertheless, despite the ambiguity about her nationality and allegiance, she has continuously scored astounding victories in all the elections she has campaigned in. In the 2010 upper house election, she gained a record 1.71 million votes in her Tokyo constituency, more than double her closest rival's result. And this time around, she won the party election by a landslide with 503 of the 849 available points in a system that reflects votes from party members as well as lawmakers in prefectural assemblies and the Diet.

Her signature moment as a politician came in 2009, when she was part of a panel reviewing wasteful government spending across the board. When government scientists insisted that the budget for supercomputers should not be cut if Japan aspires to be the world's No. 1, Renho asked: "What's wrong with being No. 2?"

She continued her streak of candor this year by calling Katsuya Okada, the then-leader of the party, "a very boring man."

Now, Renho herself is in a position where she cannot afford to be No. 2. But reviving the unpopular Democratic Party will be no easy task. Approval ratings have been stuck at about 10% since its creation in March. The ruling Liberal Democratic Party, by contrast, commands about 40% support.

"In America, a woman has finally come close to becoming the president," Renho wrote in a flyer during the party election campaign. "In South Korea and in Taiwan, the leaders are women. Tokyo has a female governor. Now, I will stand to lead," she said.