Takaichi will brush off Albanese’s melon joke. She shouldn’t have to

Beijing: Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi knows how to roll with the punches.

She is not just a hard-nosed political operative, but a self-made one. With no political pedigree of her own, she has ascended to the top of Japan’s famously dynastic and patriarchal system, which has typically reserved its elite positions for the sons of important men.

One can be fairly confident that in the three decades she has spent toiling in Japanese politics, she has brushed off all manner of innuendo that has typically plagued women in pursuit of power.

Whether he intended to or not, Anthony Albanese has forced her to brush off another one.

“She brought two. As you do,” the Australian prime minister said in a now surely regrettable podcast interview in July, accompanying the remark with an unfortunate cupping gesture.

He was referring to the expensive crown melons Takaichi gifted him during her visit to Australia in May – a gift he initially called “strange” despite the fact that Japanese fruit is widely regarded as the most elite across Asia.

Bush Deep podcast host Nikki Osborne filled in the gaps with a jibe about Takaichi “smuggling” the melons in and looking like Pamela Anderson, which Albanese let sail through to the keeper.

This interview, by the way, took place in a sitting room at The Lodge, the prime minister’s official residence in Canberra.

Taken in its broader context, it’s difficult to ignore the optics of the Australian leader disparaging the gift of a close ally in a conversation that clearly conjured links between melons and breasts. Even if Albanese wasn’t the chief conjurer, it was his house, his standards.

Incidents like these often become political Rorschach tests, refracted through the endless tedium of culture wars and political point scoring. People tend to side with their political teams about whether this type of thing is a gratuitous beat-up or something befitting an apology.

On Monday – a full month after the podcast aired – Opposition Leader Angus Taylor framed it as an act of hypocrisy by a left-leaning prime minister, while Social Services Minister Tanya Plibersek rejected the innuendo suggestions and called on people to make up their own minds.

To be sure, the Coalition only began clamouring for an apology after former Japanese ambassador Shingo Yamagami denounced Albanese’s remarks as an “insulting joke” that “casually mocked” Takaichi in an editorial in The Australian. Yamagami tied his point to a political one, leveraging it to repeat his semi-regular criticism that Labor has been too meek in the face of China’s aggression, and its bullying of Takaichi.

This incident has received a paucity of coverage in the Japanese press. It’s a silence that Japanese journalist Waka Ikeda noted extended across the country’s political divide.

“The Australian prime minister made a sexual joke about the Japanese prime minister. And in Japan, both right and left, men and women, feminists too, the LDP and the Communist Party – all stayed silent,” she wrote in July.

As an arch-conservative who holds traditional views of gender roles, Takaichi is hardly an ally of the feminist movement. She won’t be expecting their support, nor be surprised when it doesn’t materialise.

Equally, Japanese officials have declined to publicly weigh in on the issue when approached by the Australian press.

This is not the type of gaffe that will shake the bilateral relationship, but nor should the diplomats’ silence be interpreted as an absence of dismay about the framing of their leader in such a cavalier and jocular way.

Multiple things can be true at once. Albanese may not have intended offence. He is a stronger advocate of women’s causes than Takaichi. The issue has been spun through the political wringer.

Takaichi will brush it off. She shouldn’t have to.

Get a note directly from our foreign correspondents on what’s making headlines around the world. Sign up for our weekly What in the World newsletter.