Japanese MP in trouble for deeply homophobic TV interview

Japanese MP, Mio Sugita from the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), has come under for a extremely anti-LGBT 2015 television interview. The interview was recently brought to attention after a magazine published an opinion piece from her in which she doubled down on her homophobic beliefs.

In the interview, she said accepting LGBT+ people would lead to “an increase in unhappy people” and that most gay people were simply going through a phase. “Adolescent children sometimes have strange feelings. I grew up in a girl’s high school, so there were only female people around me,” she said on the television show ‘From the Country of the Rising Sun’.

“If you have a cool girl, you can write a love letter to her. But as years go by, you can usually fall in love with a man, get married and become a mother.”

She also said teachers shouldn’t defend gay students and that their time was better spent elsewhere.

This last statement is particularly alarming as LGBT+ Japanese students face incredibly high levels of bullying. A study in 2017 found 50 percent of LGBT+ people in Japan had been bullied in high school and that 70 percent of them had found their teacher did nothing to help them.

Mio Sugita’s own party has since distanced itself from her comments.

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