Of Love & Law: A new documentary about LGBT lawyers in Japan

Remember Hikaru Toda?

She’s the filmmaker who produced a documentary about love hotels we featured in 2014.

Now the Osaka- and London-based Toda (who has lived abroad for over 20 years) and her production studio, Little Stranger Films, is working on a documentary, Of Love & Law, about Japan’s first LGBT law firm.

She has launched a crowdfunding campaign on Kickstarter to raise $30,000 to finish the project.

This is a documentary for anyone that has ever found themselves challenging or being challenged by the status quo.

Of Love & Law tells the hidden stories of people who are silenced and made invisible by Japanese society and its laws. What are the risks of being yourself and being an outsider in your own country? Should love be ruled by laws that don’t represent you?

It centers on Fumi and Kazu, a real-life couple who run the first and only law firm in Japan set up by an openly gay couple.

The cases they cover in their Osaka law office include people who are not part of Japan’s koseki family register system and so have no official identity.

One of their major clients is the “vagina artist” Rokudenashiko, aka Megumi Igarashi, who has been battling the Japanese police and state over its outdated obscenity laws.

Here’s an early trailer of the film.