JAPAN-ELECTION/GAY CANDIDATE Japan's only openly gay candidate runs in general election

Record ID: 278229

  • Title: JAPAN-ELECTION/GAY CANDIDATE Japan's only openly gay candidate runs in general election
  • Date: 12th December 2014
  • Summary: TOKYO, JAPAN (FILE - JULY 2007) (ORIGINALLY 4:3) (REUTERS) FIRST OPENLY LESBIAN CANDIDATE, KANAKO OTSUJI, ON CAMPAIGN TRAIL SHAKING HANDS RAINBOW FLAG CAMPAIGN PARADE THROUGH STREETS OF TOKYO
  • Embargoed: 27th December 2014 12:00
  • Keywords:
  • Location: Japan
  • Country: Japan
  • Topics: General
  • Reuters ID: LVA8BWBU4QOOOS7FPUUYQFTZ4AQ0
  • Story Text: EDITORS PLEASE NOTE: THIS EDIT CONTAINS MATERIAL WHICH WAS ORIGINALLY 4:3
    Taiga Ishikawa, Japan's only openly gay candidate in the upcoming general elections, is fighting an uphill battle.
    He is a member of the small Social Democratic Party which some media have even predicted will lose all its seats on December 14 when Japanese go to the polls.
    He is also the nation's only openly gay candidate in a deeply conservative nation where most prefer homogeneity over diversity.
    Yet he hopes his running as the nation's only openly gay candidate will change awareness amongst the general population and help the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) community come out of the closet.
    "It is said that three to five percent of the population in Japan is LGBT. I would like to think that these people could use their vote to tell the nation that they exist. It would be my raison-d'être to win in this campaign as an openly gay candidate if I could help LGBT people to show others that they exist," Ishikawa said on his campaign trail through suburban Tokyo on Tuesday (December 9).
    The 40 year-old became Tokyo's first of two elected openly gay politicians when he won a seat on April 11 in Toshima ward city assembly. Apart from openly lesbian Kanako Otsuji, who managed a very brief two month stint in the Japanese upper house of parliament in 2013 after she replaced an incumbent who died but who had previously won over her in an election in 2007, there have been no openly gay politicians at the national level.
    "If Ishikawa gets a seat in parliament it will greatly encourage the LGBT community and is of enormously significance," Tadatomo Yoshida, leader of the Social Democratic Party added.
    Homosexuality has not been criminalised in Japan except during a brief seven-year period in the late 19th century. However members of the LGBT community have long faced discrimination at school, home and in the work place where individuals are expected to conform with the majority. Most Japanese gays, lesbians and bisexuals prefer to hide their true identities than face bullying in school, banishment from home or lose their jobs.
    According to a Ipsos poll for Reuters only five percent of Japanese say they know someone who is LGBT, compared to 60 or 70 percent in most western nations, making the Japanese LGBT community the nation's largest invisible minority.
    Even staunch Social Democratic Party followers, such as Noriko Aiko, prefer to avoid the subject of same-sex politics.
    "I don't understand such difficult things. But I just think its important that individual lives be respected," the 70-year-old retiree said.
    LGBT activists, such as Kazuhiro Terada of Equal Marriage Alliance (EMA) who are working to get same-sex marriage in Japan in time for the Tokyo Olympics in 2020, admits the LGBT community's political clout may not help Taiga Ishikawa.
    "Unfortunately I don't think Japan is at a stage yet where the LGBT community has political clout. It is true that the LGBT community is more than five percent of the population but most are invisible and LGBT issues have never made it into the political discussion," Terada said.
    EMA is working to change that and has compiled a list of 20 candidates in the coming election that have openly expressed their support for LGBT rights and same-sex marriage.
    Another group, Partnership Law Japan, added an another ten names to the list of candidate.
    However these thirty candidate make up just a small portion of the total 1191 candidates running for the powerful Lower House of Parliament.
    Also, despite several of the LGBT-friendly candidates being from the ruling Liberal Democratic Party on those lists, the LDP headquarters has made headlines in the LGBT community after it told a survey by local non-profit organisation, Rainbow Pride Ehime, that it did not consider the need to tackle LGBT rights a basic human right. It also replied in the same survey that marriage and partnership laws were only for people of the opposite sex.
    While the opposition party was more LGBT friendly in this survey, it is likely to make very little difference in the upcoming elections where the ruling LDP party and their coalition partners Komeito are expected would keep their two-thirds majority, allowing LDP to claim a new mandate, according to Japanese media.
    As for Taiga Ishikawa, he is facing at least two formidable opponents in his proportional representation seat in Tokyo:
    Miki Yamada, a 40-year-old former marketing executive of Hermes, running as the voice of working women in the ruling party, and Banri Kaieda, the head of the Democratic Party of Japan - the largest and most powerful opposition party.
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