Death by Overwork: Sanae Takaichi, Japan's Prime Minister Now Sleeps Less Than Margaret Thatcher

Sanae Takaichi posted something this week that has since drawn more than 35 million views. Since taking office as Japan's prime minister in October, she wrote, zero to three hours of sleep has been the norm. During Japan's recent Sea Day public holiday, a national holiday most people spend at the beach, she managed five hours for what she called the first time in ages, and described it as a true blessing. She then spent part of that same holiday ironing her own handkerchiefs and undergarments and sewing loose buttons, because the Japanese prime minister's official residence, unlike its American equivalent, employs no domestic staff at all.

Japan’s Iron Lady

Takaichi has spent years building her political identity around a single reference point. She has called herself Japan's Iron Lady, and it turns out she is emulating Margaret Thatcher in more than just her conservative policies. Thatcher's four hours of sleep a night became one of the most repeated facts of her premiership, so well known that researchers studying a genuine rare genetic variant that lets some people function on less sleep than average later nicknamed it the Margaret Thatcher gene. Takaichi has now, by her own account, gone below the number that made her role model famous in the first place. Two hours most nights, four at the longest, she told lawmakers in November, adding, with more self-awareness than the job usually allows, that it was probably bad for her skin. The following month she summoned aides to a 3am meeting ahead of a 9am hearing, because her fax machine at home had jammed and she needed the briefing papers reviewed regardless.