It was a given that Yoshihide Suga, the new leader of Japan's ruling party, would be elected prime minister in the Diet in September to succeed Shinzo Abe, so when a 45-year-old female lawmaker from an opposition party received a single vote, many thought she had simply voted for herself.
But it soon came to light that Takae Ito, an Upper House member for the Democratic Party for the People, had received the vote from a fellow female lawmaker, Shizuka Terata, an independent.
"I want Ms. Ito to drastically change Japan," Terata wrote in a blog post on Sept. 16 explaining her choice, in which she also argued that "other countries have changed their societal structure at 10 to 20 times the speed" of her home country.