China has opened a new front in its pressure campaign against Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi by reviving a decade-old photograph that places her beside a man branded a neo-Nazi politician.
The image, taken in 2014, shows Takaichi with Kazunari Yamada, a far-right activist whose earlier profile on the website of the Matsushita Institute of Government and Management, the leadership program that helped launch Takaichi's political career, is among the material circulating alongside it. Nothing in the photograph establishes that Takaichi endorses his views, and no wrongdoing has been proven against her.
The resurgence of the image lands against a charged backdrop of wartime memory: earlier this month, visitors packed the Memorial Hall of the Victims in Nanjing Massacre by Japanese Invaders in Jiangsu province, one of China's most emotionally loaded sites of historical grievance. Takaichi is under mounting scrutiny as she navigates a leadership tested at every turn by Beijing.