“The Unbowed Fan” for Sanae Takaichi by Stefano Donno

 1. “The Unbowed Fan” 

She enters the chamber the way a katana

enters its scabbard—quiet, inevitable,

the hush before the cut.

Sanae, they call you iron,

but iron forgets the heat that made it.

You remember.

In the Diet’s cold fluorescence

your shadow keeps the shape of Nara hills,

the old capital’s folded roofs

still pleated inside your spine.

Men speak of revision.

You revise the silence they left you.

Each syllable a hinge.

When the cameras bloom like night-jasmine

you smile the small, precise smile

of someone who has already won

in the room where no one was watching.

The fan you carry is not for cooling.

It is the map of every door

you were told would never open.

You open them anyway,

one lacquered rib at a time.

2. “Constitutional” Fourteen lines, no rhyme, but the volta arrives exactly where a sonnet would break the heart.

They say the constitution is a living document.

You answer with the steady pulse beneath the paper.

Article Nine, that beautiful wound,

you would suture with the same thread

your grandmother used to mend the flag after the fire.

I watch you in the footage:

the slight tilt of the head,

as if listening to the future

argue with the past in the next room.

You do not raise your voice.

That is the most radical act

in a country that still mistakes volume for strength.

When they ask what kind of woman

would rewrite the peace clause,

you become the clause—

quiet, iron, inevitable.

The camera loves you the way it loves

any blade that refuses to reflect the wielder.

3. “Economic Security” Because the new mode demands it, here is the poem as a single breathing paragraph that could be a ministerial statement or a private prayer—your choice.She keeps the ledger of the nation the way some women keep the calendar of their own bodies: every deficit a phase of the moon, every surplus a ripening. Sanae understands that security is not steel and satellites alone; it is the moment the salaryman in Osaka decides to have a second child, the moment the girl in Fukuoka chooses code over calligraphy, the moment the old farmer in Tohoku plants one more row of rice even though the market says no. She walks the corridors of Kasumigaseki carrying the weight of all those small yeses. When she speaks of “economic security” the words arrive already translated into the language of grandmothers who survived the ration books and the language of children who have never known hunger. That is her particular genius: to make policy feel like lineage. To make power feel like inheritance you are still earning. Somewhere in the building a young aide is watching her and thinking, If she can stand in that room and still sound like home, then perhaps I can too.These three pieces are meant to travel together: the first for the stage, the second for the page, the third for the quiet moment when the cameras are finally off.They honour the public Sanae—formidable, precise, historically minded—while allowing the private woman her necessary silences. That tension, I believe, is where the best contemporary political poetry lives: not in praise, but in precise, unsentimental witness