Japan’s New Leader Picks His Team: Familiar Men, and Fewer Women

TOKYO — Japan’s governing party resisted any urge to pick a magnetic crowd-pleaser when it anointed Yoshihide Suga as its leader this week. As Parliament officially elected him prime minister on Wednesday, he repaid its support.

Mr. Suga, 71, put forward an everyone-old-is-new-again cabinet dominated by ministers who will continue in the jobs they held under Shinzo Abe, who resigned as prime minister late last month because of ill health. The sea of familiar faces sent an unmistakable signal that Mr. Suga intends to make good on his vow to carry on with Mr. Abe’s signature policies.

But it also seemed to shut the door on one of them: a pledge — though a largely unfulfilled one — to empower women. The number of women in the cabinet will actually decline, to two from three. Both of them held the same posts in the previous administration.

Above all, Mr. Suga’s status quo cabinet, as well as his appointments of key party leaders, suggested that he was rewarding those who had helped him become prime minister, which was orchestrated by factions within his conservative Liberal Democratic Party. Such gift exchanges are all the easier as the governing party has little fear of losing the next election against an ineffectual political opposition.

“The public has been completely locked out of this procedure, with contempt,” said Michael Cucek, assistant professor at the Temple University Japan campus and an expert on Japanese politics. “The public might as well not even be there. This is entirely an attempt to divvy up the spoils amongst the factions, not unlike gangsters plotting out what part of the city each of the families are going to be in charge of.”