During the recently closed Koizumi Era, the media was mostly silent about the former prime minister's marital status and lack of female companionship.

As a political issue, so-called family values carry weight and are often considered a litmus test for candidates; and Junichiro Koizumi's personal history as a husband and father left much to be desired according to conventional thinking. Divorced and voluntarily estranged from the youngest of his three sons (the actor Kotaro Koizumi), he was never really examined by the media for his ability to empathize with the responsibilities most Japanese men his age had to assume as heads of households.

To his credit, Koizumi never discussed moral issues the way his Liberal Democratic Party colleagues often do, which distinguishes him from former President Ronald Reagan, another once-divorced national leader whose reputation as an apathetic father didn't prevent him from preaching on the subject of the sanctity of the nuclear family. Of course, Reagan still had his second wife, Nancy, to complement his image as America's granddad, but even if Koizumi was conspicuously single during his tenure, his own feminine tendencies made up for the lack of a real woman by his side.