Ishiba Shigeru and LGBT Rights: What Will He Do?

A short follow-up to my blog post from last week, now about Ishiba Shigeru and LGBT Rights.

The LDP election is over, and Ishiba Shigeru has become the new Prime Minister of Japan.

As I wrote last week, Ishiba Shigeru and LGBT Rights are a little bit iffy. He actually responded to Marriage for All’s survey, with responses that I’d generally say are positive. Like, they weren’t enthusiastic, but if he wants to be a popular leader who doesn’t get booted out after 2 years like most of the non-Abe Prime Ministers of the last four decades, he sure should champion it.

Maybe I’m overselling it. He didn’t even directly say he wanted gay marriage… He just sort of implied in in politician-speak…

Of course, amazing website Unseen Japan has already covered this exact topic before I even got around to writing this post.

And… Yep, it’s not looking too different from usual. He picked an anti-LGBT cabinet minister, always a poor sign of things to come. And he’s called a snap election on October 27th, which means the whole country will be inundated with campaigning and this issue will probably barely be discussed because it isn’t divisive enough.

I guess the only real chance we have is if there’s a shocking UK-style turnaround and the non-LDP parties can win a majority of seats and form a coalition against them. Because of small parties who will never work together, the non-LDP (and non-Komeito) parties will have to win a good 250 of the 465 seats to actually make something work. And currently…

They gotta win like 80-90 more seats, which would be… a difficult feat but nowhere near impossible. The center-left party dominated in 2009 with a huge 195-seat gain, and then lost it all three years later with 251 seats down.

But opinion polls haven’t even come out yet, so it’s hard to say how the next month will go. I really, really, really hope the LDP will be severely weakened, if only for gay marriage, but also for a lot of other stuff that’s outside of the scope of this blog post. But there doesn’t seem to be the momentum here for it yet.

A weakened party could be one that actually gets off its ass and codifies it into law. Or a weakened party could boot out their brand new dude and replace him with a further-right jerk like Takaichi…

So, as for Ishiba Shigeru and LGBT rights, I gotta say, shrug I have no idea how this will play out.