Reasons for Hope
How Queerness is Evolving in Japan
My trip to Japan in late March and early April was inspiring in so many ways. Yes, there was much in the way of recommendations for new travelers to Japan, and I will continue to share that with paid subscribers (I know not everyone can afford travel), and there were many ideas for future issues for Out of Japan, too. I will be writing about everything from art to toilets (because, wow, toilet tech is proliferating rapidly).
I want to talk more about living on the rainbow in Japan, and share some anecdotes that reflect the changes in queer life since I was there last in 2016, not to mention since I moved away in 1998.
The topic is particularly timely because this weekend is Rainbow Pride in Tōkyō, a celebration that began in the 1990s. When I attended back then, most Japanese participants were weary of public exposure and masks were the order of the day. Today, however, masks are the exception rather than the rule. Confidence has grown within the community and so has the urge to fight.
News reports regarding the fight for marriage equality in Japan (the only G7 country without that equality) are fond of citing that Japan has “long” followed “traditional family values” but if you’ve read older issues of Out of Japan you would know that so-called traditional values were a Western import and were only fully embraced in Japan after the end of WWII. For a country with more than two millennia of history, seventy years is far from long.
During my travels, however, more and more heterosexual friends and former colleagues were aware of the true benefits of marriage equality. People commiserated with me over the death of gay friends whose blood relatives proceeded to lock the surviving partners out of their homes, denying them any access to the funeral, let along the belongings the reflected their lives together. People also mentioned to lack of hospital visitation rights.
Official Hope?
In the last decade or so, local governments have stepped in to fill the gap caused by national immobility on equality. City and preferential governments across the archipelago continue to enact partnership registries which extend a small subset of benefits to registered couples, including hospital visitation rights.
But as we true for domestic partnership and state-level civil marriage in the United States before Obergefell v. Hodges in 2015 (the Supreme Court ruling that enabled marriage equality for all of the United States), all rights and benefits evaporate the moment you leave entity where those rights were enacted. You registered as partners in Shibuya City, within Tōkyō? Good luck with hospital visitation issues if your partner falls ill when traveling together elsewhere in Japan.
Starting in 2019, sixteen couples have filed suit for marriage equality in Japan’s five district courts (Sapporo, Tōkyō, Nagoya, Ōsaka, and Fukuoka). The first ruling in Sapporo, announced in 2021, found that barring marriage equality was unconstitutional. And although one other court (Ōsaka, I think) has issued a mixed ruling since then, the other courts have yet to rule.
Meanwhile, approval of marriage equality has grown to more than eighty percent in favor. Because I am married to a Japanese man, I keep a close eye on this issue in particular. My hope is to retire (whenever that might happen) with a Japanese passport to hand.
Unofficial Exuberance
Queer people are not waiting on the courts for their joy, however. More and more I hear about people coming out to their parents, a topic that was nearly taboo in 1989. I also hear about couples fighting to live together, pitting themselves against landlords and real estate agents who normally considered two men living together as a property damage risk (although homophobia has been more and more obvious since the arrival of HIV-AIDS in the mid 1990s).
金閣寺 (Kinkakuji), the Golden Pavilion, in Kyōto, is a major tourist attraction for Japanese people as well as foreigners.
Hiro and I visited the Golden Pavilion on a perfect day late last March. After more than two years without foreign tourists (given the COVID-19 restrictions), Kyōto was awash with them and the Golden Pavilion is a top destination. I heard Mandarin, Cantonese, Korean, Vietnamese, more languages from India and Eastern Europe, and a lot of French as we made our way through the compound.
There were also a lot of Japanese tourists.
The sun blazed and when Hiro and I spotted the chance to rest, we took it, sitting on red-felted benches under red bamboo-slatted parasols to take tea. (I’ve realized that the tea ceremony ritual I once learned was 表千家 (omotesenke), where, after observing the tea bowl, you rotate it clockwise a quarter turn from the outer-facing edge to once again observe, in case anyone is curious.)
As we sat, our cameras unloaded, our shoulders relaxing, a group of three young Japanese people sat at a nearby bench. Two women and one queen, as zaftig of figure as I always have been, but luxuriating in a pair of black Lycra shorts and a fluffy multi-hued sweater. As I watched him pose for his friends camera, I realized I admired his fearlessness as he laughed and gestured in ways I would only have done within the safety of gay bar when I was his age.
It’s a cliché, I suppose, to depict the older generation beaming with joy at younger people empowered to be themselves, but it was true happiness to sit with my tea, smiling at Hiro, and beatifying the younger man with my pride.
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