Izumi Hosaka, an openly MtF transgender woman living in the city of Nemuro, Hokkaido won her first election on September 10th. Twenty people ran for that election and she obtained the fifth most votes. Ms. Hosaka is registered as a man on family registry in Japan, but she lives as a woman and she openly came out as a transgender when she ran for that election. Another good news is the city of Nemuro stopped dividing candidates by sex from this election in response to the petition she made to the city for the abolishment of gender section on an
Read More

On March 9th, as many as three hundred participants gathered at First Diet Members’ Office Building to attend “Rainbow Diet”, a gathering that asks for enactment of a law aimed at achieving better understanding of LGBTs among the public and prohibiting LGBT discrimination. The gathering was filled with excitement. Twelve Diet members from “LGBT all-party parliamentary group,” Shigeaki Saegusa (a composer), Kazuyo Katsuma(an economic analyst), and personnels from Japan Business Federation and U.N made a speech respectively. LGBT participants appealed the importance of the law and a jurist gave a briefing on the law. (There was supposed to be a
Read More