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By Waka Ikeda

Jul 27, 2026

When Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi visited Australia in May, she brought her host a gift chosen with diplomatic care: Crown Melons from Shizuoka, the most prized fruit in Japan, to mark Australia’s decision in January to reopen its market to Japanese melons. In Japan, a single Crown Melon can cost more than a fine bottle of wine. Its perfection, based on the Japanese artisan spirit of takumi, is what you bring when you wish to honor someone.

Two months later, on a podcast called “Bush Deep,” Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese recalled the gift as “strange” but ultimately quite good. His host, the comedian Nikki Osborne, likened the melons to actress Pamela Anderson. Albanese then grinned, raised his hands to chest height in a cupping gesture and said, “She brought two. As you do.” The studio laughed. The clip traveled around the world.

Consider who was being laughed at. Takaichi is the first female prime minister in Japanese history, and she leads a country locked in its most dangerous confrontation with China in decades. After she told the Diet last November that a Chinese attack on Taiwan could threaten Japan’s survival, a Chinese consul general posted, in a message since deleted, about cutting off her “dirty neck.” Each of Beijing’s military theater commands issued statements denouncing her. This is the leader of Australia’s closest security partner in Asia, and her state gift became a breast joke on a crude podcast.

What happened next is the real story, because almost nothing happened at all.

Albanese’s office issued a one-sentence written apology, but for a different offense: his musings in the same interview about wanting to “shag” singer Kylie Minogue. He has never addressed the Takaichi joke, never said whether any apology reached Tokyo or repeated the written apology aloud. His acting minister for women declined to comment. The Victorian premier, Jacinta Allan, waved the interview away as lighthearted. This from the government of a man who had declared, only weeks earlier, and in Allan’s defense over a billboard calling her a witch, that it is “completely unacceptable to demean, objectify, belittle or offend women.”

Feminist commentators and the progressive press erupted over his remarks about Minogue, an Australian national treasure. The joke about a visiting head of government drew far less. Demands that Takaichi receive a direct apology came almost entirely from the right. Opposition outrage is never free of opportunism. But the pattern tells its own story. An Australian pop star’s dignity commanded a national conversation; a Japanese prime minister’s didn’t.

Tokyo has been no braver. The Japanese Embassy in Canberra declined repeated requests for comment, according to Australian media. The logic is cold and familiar: Japan needs Australia on trade and security, especially now, and the first female prime minister, fighting Beijing, cannot afford a quarrel with Canberra over her own chest. Her dignity was weighed against the alliance and found lighter.

Here the silence acquires another layer, and it is the one I know best. Japan’s prominent feminist voices have not defended her either, and their reasons are internally consistent. Takaichi opposes allowing married couples to retain separate surnames. She opposes quotas and a female emperor, and she is pushing to revise Japan’s pacifist Constitution, a cause the country’s feminist movement has long defined itself against. Her declared model is Margaret Thatcher, and her famous promise on taking office was to work, work, work, work and work. To Japan’s feminist establishment, she is not a sister in need of solidarity but an adversary who has spent a career voting against them. I went looking for the exceptions, the prominent feminist voice raising the alarm on her behalf. The affair has barely registered.

None of the mockery itself is new. Margaret Thatcher retrained her voice because it was judged too shrill for power. Hillary Clinton was seen as cold when firm and weak when warm, and her trouser suits received more coverage than her policy papers. Theresa May’s legs made the front page of a British newspaper during serious political talks. Angela Merkel ran Europe’s largest economy for 16 years while being told her jackets were too plain. Golda Meir was praised as the only man in her Cabinet, as if competence required an honorary sex change. The woman leader reduced to her body is one of politics’ oldest reflexes.

But for an East Asian woman there is a further layer. Last October, I wrote in Takaichi’s defense when the sexualized attacks came from her own countrymen, who called her foreign policy “geisha diplomacy” and, in the words of one opposition politician, described her as U.S. President Donald Trump’s “local wife.” I argued then that Japanese critics had internalized the West’s oldest caricature of the Japanese woman as decorative, submissive and sexually available. Albanese has now been kind enough to demonstrate where the caricature originates.

The copy was made in Japan. The original was always Western.

By contrast, last month we saw what happens when a powerful ally belittles Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni. When Trump claimed Meloni had begged him for a photograph at the G7, she rebutted him on video within hours, declaring that she and Italy do not beg anyone. Meloni’s foreign minister canceled a trip to Washington, and even her fiercest left-wing opponents rushed to her defense.

Meloni is no feminist favorite either, yet Italy decided that a woman leader’s dignity was a national interest that outranked party affiliation. I am not Takaichi’s natural defender. I have criticized her positions on surnames, on immigration rhetoric, on the female emperor issue and on a Cabinet with only two women, and I will again. That is precisely why this incident matters. If a woman’s dignity is a principle, it protects women whose politics you despise. If it protects only openly strong and demanding allies, it is not a principle at all. It is a perk of membership.

The measure of how a society really ranks its women is not whether its leaders make crude jokes. It is whom they feel safe making them about. On recent evidence, a woman may run the world’s fourth-largest economy, stare down Beijing’s threats and still be reduced, by an allied prime minister, to two melons on a podcast. The joke was beneath him and beneath Australia, a longtime ally and friend of Japan. The silence that followed was beneath everyone.