A court in Tokyo and an appellate court in Sapporo, Japan, they established that Japanese law’s ban on same-sex marriage is unconstitutional. The two sentences, both communicated this week, are the most recent in a series of verdicts concerning the rights of people from the LGBTQ+ community in Japan, the only G7 country not to recognize unions between homosexual people, and which have had mixed results.
In 2021, in a ruling considered historic, a Sapporo court ruled for the first time that same-sex couples had the constitutional right to marry. The court had argued that sexuality is not a matter of individual preference, like ethnicity and gender, and that the refusal to grant marriage licenses to homosexual people violates the Constitution’s premise of ensuring equal rights under the marriage. The following year, however, a court in Osaka said that the ban on same-sex marriage was not unconstitutional. According to the courts that examined the two cases, which have nothing to do with each other, the ban on marriage violates citizens’ rights.
Japanese law provides that marriage must be based on the “mutual consent of both sexes” and has therefore always been interpreted as a union between a man and a woman. Some municipalities provide for “union certificates”, which allow, for example, homosexual couples to rent a house more easily, but have no other legal implications. According to Japanese activists, the rulings in favor of same-sex marriage are a positive sign, but they need to be legalized with a change in the laws, and not discussed in the courts.