We want to introduce the work of Masaki C Matsumoto, a queer activist, feminist, and YouTuber working hard to challenge stereotypes about sexual minorities in Japan.
As he (perhaps provocatively) says:
"Hate crime is nonexistent in Japan," "Japan only recently started having pride marches," "homosexuality is accepted in Japan because of the traditional male-male shudo sexual/romantic culture," "Japanese media are LGBT-friendly," and "Taiga Ishikawa is the first openly gay politician in Japan" are all false!
In general, Matsumoto's main point -- and it's a good one -- is that ...
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 ...
The 2016 Tokyo Rainbow Pride (TRP) march was held on May 8th and with other events all weekend long celebrating sexual minorities.
On the Sunday some 5,000 LGBT people and supporters walked between Harajuku and Shibuya, accompanied by 18 floats -- the most ever in the history of TRP. The event was centered on Yoyogi Park in Shibuya ward, which has established itself as a gay-friendly neighborhood after it became the first government in Japan to offer some sort of legal recognition of same-sex couples.
The revellers were joined by Caroline Kennedy, US ambassador to Japan, along with ...
A Yokohama court has ordered a transsexual parlor to leave a residential complex in the city after a group of residents got together to sue it on grounds of violating the terms of usage.
Locals were annoyed about the large numbers of employees and customers coming and going in the elevator.
Police were unable to do anything about Hanatsuki Yokohama because it was a classed as a gay service.
In Japan, paying for penetrative sex is illegal, so prostitution services get around this by officially not offering "full service", though this is frequently a mere camouflage maintained to ...
Gaycation is a new series from Viceland, Vice's TV channel, featuring Ellen Page and her friend traveling the world in search of gay stuff.
Episode 1 is Japan, especially Tokyo and Nichome.
Of course, Vice likes to veer toward the sensationalism, as its previous "schoolgirls for sale" article showed, and as such this episode does have some bad choices ("rent-a-friend agency and joining the party in the world's smallest gay bar").
It also starts with some cliched footage of Shibuya and halfway through resorts to shots of Scramble Crossing, but if you keep watching, there is some ...
Takaya Muto has already been forced to resign over a money scandal.
Now he might have to contend with a sex scandal too.
The 36-year-old Lower House member of the conservative Liberal Democratic Party already made a lot of enemies when he took to Twitter to brand activists protesting against the government's immensely controversial state security bills as "selfish" and "fooled" by "propaganda and false information".
That was late July.
Fast-forward a few weeks and Muto is not looking so smug now.
He has been forced to quit his party after tabloid Shukan Bunshun exposed ...
RocketNews24 paid a visit to a Boys' Love (BL) cafe in Ikebukuro.
Ikebukuro Danshi BL Gakuen is basically a maid cafe for girls, though it goes one step further than the conventional dansou butler cafes and goes all out for a BL or yaoi style. The male staff are all dressed as schoolboys and give off an effeminate, gay vibe.
Entering the cafe you become students at the school.
The menu consists of different boy-on-boy scenarios that you can order.
We decided to order the “fantasy coupling Pocky” from the menu where you get to choose two of the guys to enact a sexy ...
M.S.M. -- Men Who Have Sex With Men is an upcoming documentary about gay Japan.
Directed by Ian Thomas Ash and Adrian Storey/Uchujin, details are still slim and there's no trailer yet. But naturally Tokyo Kinky wants to know more!
Image via @MSMdocumentary
We're certainly intrigued by the tagline:
"Because not all men who have sex with men consider themselves gay."
That's an interesting phrase, especially in Japan, which has a long and vibrant gay culture, even though at the time and now it is not always recognized as "gay" in the modern sense. There were lots of man-on-man ...
7.6% of people in Japan are gay, lesbian or have gender identity disorder.
That's according to a Dentsu survey published in the Asahi Shimbun newspaper on April 24th (and that's also the sway they word the "groupings" too). It equates to 1 in 13 people.
The results were released on April 23rd. They were conducted on around 70,000 adults in Japan through an online questionnaire.
A similar survey in 2012 found that 5.2% of people, or 1 in 19 people, identified as LGBT.
The new survey was conducted on April 7th and April 8th with 69,989 people aged 20-59 across Japan.
However, ...
Japan's most high-profile lesbian couple held a "wedding ceremony" on April 19th to celebrate their union.
The ceremony is literally just ceremonial, since gay people are not allowed to get married in Japan.
Ex-Gravure model and television personality Ayaka Ichinose (34) and actress Akane Sugimori (28) announced their "marriage" in December last year and have no followed through with the big day itself.
Same-sex marriage is finally becoming a major issue in Japan.
Hotel Granvia in Kyoto now offers gay wedding ceremonies, in partnership with a local Buddhist temple, as does ...
