【by KAWASAKA Kazuyoshi, June 2024】
LGBTQ+ rights issues are again transnationally becoming a centre of polemics and well exploited by ultra-conservative and far-right activists not only under authoritarian or illiberal governments such as Russia and Hungary but also in the US and UK. And Japan is not an exception.
As Japan is the only country of the G7, or one of the only three countries of OECD members which has no same-sex marriage/partnership nor anti-discrimination law protecting LGBTQ+ people, Japan has faced international pressure as well as domestic voices against the Japanese conservative government avoiding any legal reform for LGBTQ+ rights. Just before the Tokyo 2020 Olympics which was held in 2021 due to the pandemic, a bill on the Promotion of Better Understanding of LGBT Issues was discussed in the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) as a part of the preparation for the Games as the new revised Olympic Charter banned discrimination based on sexual orientation. However, although Japanese LGBTQ activists and opposition parties called for passing the bill, the LDP did not agree to send a bill to read in the Diet and scrapped it because of strong resistance from a religious conservative group inside the LDP. The most urgent concern for the public was the pandemic during the Games anyway.
In 2023, when Japan was preparing to host the G7 summit, the US ambassador to Japan Rahm Emanuel took the initiative to raise an international voice for LGBTQ rights. As the result, 15 countries’ ambassadors released a video expressing solidarity with LGBTQ people in Japan. The Kishida administration finally passed the bill on the Promotion of Better Understanding of LGBT Issues, which is a basic law for promoting understanding on LGBTQ people in Japan, not legally protecting them from discrimination against or offering any benefit. As Japanese social conservative politicians fiercely resisted the reform, they successfully implanted the revised phrase that consideration should be paid to ‘all citizens being able to lead their lives without concern’, suggesting that LGBTQ+ people will cause fear and concern for citizens. In a response to legislating the bill on the Promotion of Better Understanding of LGBT Issues, LDP conservative politicians formed a parliamentary caucus for ‘Ensuring the Safety and Security of All Women and Fairness in Women’s Sports’ in June 2023 and the group membership grew to more than 100 lawmakers.
A similar attack against LGBTQ rights happened when the Supreme Court of Japan unanimously ruled that it was unconstitutional that the so-called ‘Gender Identity Disorder Special Act’ required transgender people to undergo sterilization in order to legally change their gender in a family register. Katayama Satsuki, an upper house lawmaker from the LDP and a co-leader of the parliamentary caucus for ‘Ensuring the Safety and Security of All Women and Fairness in Women’s Sports’, addressed in the Diet that she received many citizens’ voices expressing concerns over the Supreme Court’s decision, especially from women and public bath business owners. She demanded that the government should ensure that the guidelines must be set to prioritise the well-being, safety, and the rights of existing women and to not jeopardize them more than the current system (Jimin 2023). Her assertion in the Diet shows the extremism of the LDP right wing group against a stereotype of Japanese cultural ‘tolerance’ for LGBTQ people. First, she poses transgender people against women’s ‘right of existence’ as if it is incompatible between respecting trans rights and the autonomy of body and women’s safety and right of existing. Representing one group as an existential threat against others is typical of language instigating violence and undermines civil society. Second, the ‘concern’ which she addressed was not based on fact. Japan’s Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare already issued an order that gender separation of public bathhouses must be based on body characters, not gender identity nor legal registers. And the Supreme Court’s judgement is nothing with the order. Thus, her speech aims not to address something related to actual ‘concern’ but rather fuelling baseless fear and anxiety against trans people among people.
Anti-LGBTQ movements have historically often utilised scaremongering tactics against LGBTQ people by inciting emotions such as fear and anxiety. ‘Healthy education’ and ‘safety of child and women’ have been weaponised against women’s and LGBTQ rights. Japanese anti-gender movements in the early 2000s is one of the successful examples of how they exploited manufactured fear and anxiety against feminists and LGBTQ people. The anti-gender movements so-called bakkurasshu (backlash) was often analysed by their campaigns against a concept of gender or ‘gender-free’, but LGBTQ issues were centred in their actual political targets for protecting Japanese ‘traditional’ family values. The anti-gender movements in the 2000s tactically spread scaremongering disinformation similar to ones by on-going contemporary anti-trans discourses. Anti-gender campaigners in the 2000s, including right-leaning scholars Nishio Kanji and Yagi Shūji, misrepresented a concept of ‘gender-free’ as a notion that completely denied all gender divisions and gender roles, including biological sex, traditional ceremonies, the family system, and gender separation in physical education, toilets, shower rooms and public baths (Nishio & Yagi, 2005). They incited hateful campaigns against the pundits who tried to introduce a unisex public toilet for trans people and called them ‘Gestapos’ who were imposing the ‘soft fascism of sexual perverts’ (Nishio & Yagi, 2005, p. 262). Gay and bi people were labelled as people openly destroying people’s marriages, saying respect for the human rights of bisexuals meant that they were able to have an affair with a same-sex person outside of their heterosexual monogamous marriage (pp. 299–300). The denial of biological sexes by feminists and gender scholars were intended to encourage homosexuality, accusing ‘gender-free’ feminists of ‘envying snails – hermaphroditic animals that they celebrate as ideal gender-free symbols’ (p. 284). Such disinformation was purely baseless although their scholarly titles gave some credit to their targeted audience including conservative politicians. As the result, Japanese sexuality education was set back and LGBTQ rights has not been legally institutionalised in Japan until now.
Such fearmongering anti-LGBTQ campaigns are historically and transnationally well observed. Similar discourses of Japanese anti-gender and anti-trans movements such as ‘LGBTQ rights activists and gender scholars are denying biological sexes’ or ‘LGBTQ people are causing a moral decay in society’ often appear in contemporary anti-LGBTQ movements in the US and Russia. Anti-LGBTQ policy can be also comparable. For example, the Section 28 (1988-2000) in Britain which prohibited the ‘promotion of homosexuality’ in schools, was akin to Russian ‘gay propaganda law’ and similar campaigns are growing in the US now. Political scholars and sociologists explore political functions of emotions in radical right populism. Israeli sociologist Eva Illouz (2023) tries to analyse Benjamin Netanyahu’s populist politics in Israel focusing on four emotions: fear, disgust, resentment, and love. Although she did not particularly explore sexual politics in her book, political functions of emotions will offer explanations why radical right populists often exploit LGBTQ issues for their political means to evoke manufactured fear and anxiety.
When LGBTQ politics are discussed as the global phenomenon, it is often only focussed on pro-LGBTQ discourses such as the emergence of universal human rights discourse, global dissemination of sexual identities, and neoliberal economic forces for LGBTQ movements. However, anti-LGBTQ movements are also transnationally growing and their political tactics and discourses appear analogous. Politics of emotions can not only contextualise Japanese anti-LGBTQ movements into transnational contexts but also reveal why these scaremongering politicians have been successful in the Japanese political arena.
(Note: For more discussion, see Kazuyoshi Kawasaka, (2023), “Queers and National Anxiety: Discourses on Gender and Sexuality from Anti-Gender Backlash Movements in Japan since the 2000s,” in Stefanie Mayer and Judith Goetz (eds.), Global Perspectives on Anti-Feminism: Far-Right and Religious Attacks on Equality and Diversity, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.3366/jj.7358671.14.)
AUTHOR
KAWASAKA Kazuyoshi, Principal Investigator, Institute for Modern Japanese Studies, Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf, Germany
KAWASAKA Kazuyoshi (PhD) is principal investigator of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft
(DFG)-funded project “Sexual Diversity and Human Rights in 21st Century Japan: LGBTQ+ Activisms and Resistancevfrom a Transnational Perspective” at the Institute for Modern Japanese studies at Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf, Germany. He received his DPhil in Gender Studies (Humanities) at the University of Sussex in 2016. His research focuses on nationalism and queer politics in Japan, the globalisation of LGBTQ+ politics, and transnational anti-gender/LGBTQ+ movements. He is a co-editor of Beyond Diversity: Queer Politics, Activism, and Representation in Contemporary Japan (Düsseldorf University Press, 2024) and the author of ‘Queers and National Anxiety: Discourses on Gender and Sexuality from Anti-Gender Backlash Movements in Japan since the 2000s’ in Stefanie Mayer and Judith Goetz (eds.) Global Perspectives on Anti-Feminism: Far-Right and Religious Attacks on Equality and Diversity (Edinburgh University Press, 2023), pp. 182-201.
REFERENCES
Eva Illouz. (2023). The Emotional Life of Populism: How Fear, Disgust, Resentment, and Love Undermine Democracy. Cambridge: Polity.
Nishio, Kanji., & Yagi, Shūji. (2005). Shin-kokumin no yudan: ‘Gender free’ ‘kageki na seikyōiku’ ga nihon wo horobosu [Neo-awakening nationals: ‘Gender free‘ and ‘radical sex education’ will ruin Japan]. Tokyo: PHP.
“Jimin, Katayama-shi, LGBT shishin de shinchō taiō o yōsei, Shushō wa ‘teinei ni kentō’” [Liberal Democratic Party’s Katayama Requests Cautious Response on LGBT Guidelines, Prime Minister States ‘Careful Consideration’]. (2023). Asahi Shinbun. 20 November. Access at https://www.asahi.com/articles/ASRCN71WRRCNUTFK01X.html