Roughly a decade behind the U.S. and U.K., Japan is adopting diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives. But it is doing so without confronting the definitional fights that have already put those frameworks into question in other countries. DEI has proven to be a term nobody agreed upon in advance — and the costs of that ambiguity are now evident in courtrooms, women’s sports and universities.
What has changed is not the rationale for equality, but its content. When the U.S. Supreme Court recognized , it aligned with a shift in public opinion that accepted that extending the right to marry to one group took nothing away from another.
In Japan, there is little argument against equality per se: Homosexuality was never criminalized in the way that it was in many Western countries and being gay or queer has not traditionally carried a threat of prosecution, even without same-sex marriage laws other nations have now adopted.
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