Profile: Kanako Otsuji
Born in 1974 in Nara, Kanako Otsuji was elected to serve as a representative for Sakai city in the Osaka Prefectural Assembly on April 13, 2003. The August 2005 publication of her autobiography Coming Out: A Journey to Find My True Self marked the start of her new life as Japan's first out politician. In May of 2007, Otsuji was officially recognized by the Democratic Party of Japan as their representative candidate for the Upper House election. Ultimately, Otsuji did not secure a win, but she did became the first ever openly gay district assembly member to run for Parliament endorsed by a major political party.www.otsuji-k.com
【Link】 Interview with Kanako Otsuji
【Link】 Press Conference

Profile: Naomi Matsunaga
Naomi Matsunaga graduated from Keio University's Graduate School of Letters with a Master of Arts in Literature. Currently, he lectures at the University of Geneva in Switzerland while publishing his plays and short stories. In 1999, Naomi Matsunaga's contemporary drama, Les ténèbres éternelles (The Eternal Darkness), was awarded an Honorable Mention to the Special Encouragement Prize for Fiction in Performing Arts by Japan's Agency for Cultural Affairs.
www.matsunaganaomi.com (Japanese only)

--Is there anything else you would like to touch on, like other possible reasons behind why you did not get elected - or, in retrospect, what you wish you had or hadn't done ?

M:
One thing that we came to understand this time around was that we did not necessarily win votes by directing our campaign singularly to the LGBT community. Generally speaking, we have to provide a better picture of the benefits that the general - and straight - public would enjoy by putting a gay candidate like Kanako Otsuji in the national government. Otherwise, I think that votes won't materialize, even when you actively talk about democracy and human rights. It would be great if more LGBT people would consciously recognize that this campaigning is in the interest of our happiness in life and thereby come to push for Otsuji. But, as we talked about earlier, people may harbor complexes or have other problems which means votes don't come easy. Aya Kamikawa's success in getting elected to the Setagaya assembly in Tokyo was based on the fact that not only did she identify as a person with GID, but she was also appealing to the general public. She made a strong case for the idea that we ought to have people who are visually-impaired or physically-challenged, for example, elected into local government in order to see that our local infrastructure is modified to benefit the special needs of all.
She strategically was able to take a stand as one of the under-represented. The elderly can work in the same way. I would have liked to provide the public with more of an idea of what in society would change by having Otsuji in the Diet. Humanism is a very important concept, but that alone cannot spur Japanese people to thinking.

--I see. What did you think, Ms Otsuji?

O:
When we look at who succeeded in getting elected in July, we see that the winners in the DPJ party alone were candidates backed by large labor unions, or those with religious organizations supporting them, or candidates who had already served numerous terms in the Diet's Lower House - meaning that they had rock-solid clubs managing their district base, and then there were the candidates who began in television as actual celebrities. Candidates who didn't fall into any of those groups did not get elected. In light of that, I see that since I had no organizational base, there were really no votes that I could have fortified. Also, I only campaigned on the level of 'identity politics'. In other words, I was selected by the DPJ not for what I did when I was an assembly member in Osaka, but because I was the 'gay candidate'. The gay vote appeared attractive to the party and, in actuality, I did show them that.

M:
Interesting. I also thought about that early on. For instance, I don't know how many bars there are in Nichome, but if you got everybody there seriously involved, you'd have tens of thousands of votes right off the bat.

O:
But, one thing that the election results seemed to show was the very fact that minority groups find it difficult to manifest solidarity due to their minority status. In fact, politicians from non-LGBT minority groups also ran, but didn't get enough votes for a win either. The difficulty we experience in creating solidarity despite our minority status, and the lack of political concern in our community are issues possibly not limited to the LGBT community.

M:
And then, from an entirely different professional arena, we have these TV celebrities who are actually getting put into office. It's perturbing.

O:
The public feels familiar with these personalities they know from TV. But they don't feel the same familiarity in seeing or hearing from Kanako Otsuji. It's like, "Who the hell is Kanako Otsuji?" (laughs). And I can see why. Even when campaigning on a nation-wide scale, recognition only goes so far.

M:
It would be great if your name were broadcast in the mass media a bit more.

O:
But, as it was, from among the minority party candidates my showing was pretty good. As I said earlier, there are a lot of problems that minority groups face specifically because of how we are marginalized as minorities. And just as some of those individuals will say "Don't lump me together with everybody else", they'll also say "Don't act like you're our delegate just because you're a lesbian". Ultimately each of us has a hard time connecting to others in our minority group because of all the pain we harbor after how we've been marginalized as a minority.

M:
In the Christian world in Europe, it's easier for LGBT people to unite because oppressive public figures, like for example the Pope, [or anti gay laws such as section 28 in the UK] that may appear as a visible enemy. They come to form a better unity because, without unity, there's a great sense of danger. In fact, in some countries in Europe, homosexuality itself was a crime up to the Sixties. However, gay people in Japan - for better of for worse - have no visible enemy.

O:
And so it seems that queer people in Japan are always indirectly shooting themselves in the foot. It's hard to figure out what we can do about that.

M:
Well, rather than focus on the negative, I do also think that a lot has been changed by Otsuji's run for the Diet. In particular, a tremendous message has reached Japanese teenagers and youth in general.

O:
It would make me very happy to think that I've really reached some of them.

M:
I certainly think you can believe you have.

O:
Above everything else, that would rank as one key positive outcome of my entering the national race this year. The message may have reached the whole country.

M:
It gives people hope just to see that someone like you is out there...to see someone able to live as you do - being a lesbian.

O:
Yes, I think so. In the same way the singer Michiru Sasano's coming out 12 years ago was so encouraging to me. At the time I was convinced that it was wrong for two girls to be together. I thought homosexuality was something not meant to exist (laughs). But thanks to her I was able to accept that it's ok to date someone of the same sex, and live my life in that way. For those reasons, I do hope that by entering the elections I've become a positive influence for teenagers today.

M:
I'm sure you have. We can't know who will come out or not, but the fact that youth today can be aware that people are out there living gay lives...well, that knowledge will serve as a strength, I think.

--Having debate stirred up is in itself extremely valuable. Especially since then you've got everybody talking. Otherwise, these kinds of things would normally never come up in conversation. I'm even hearing stories of young people who were out [but unable to talk about it] finally having this to discuss with their parents. I think it's groundbreaking that the space to talk about these things has been created, even if just for a short time.

M:
Ryuhei Kawada※ said, "Luckily I won the election, but even if I hadn't I think that by showing others how - even with HIV - I can be in the public eye and do my thing, I can be a symbol of strength for other persons with HIV". In that sense, I think that Otsuji's run for office was a great event for Japanese society.　※(Ryuhei Kawada is a politician who, as a young boy with hemophilia, contracted HIV through tainted blood products in the late 80's. He later joined a lawsuit against Green Cross Corporation, which had provided the tainted blood products, and won the case in 1997. He ran as a independent party candidate in the national elections of 2007 and won a seat.)

O:
Yeah. That's why sometimes we'd be handing out flyers and have old women say things like, "Ah, so Japan has now entered this new era too..." (laughs).

M:
That's right (laughs). And that's also important- it's fantastic to have heterosexuals recognizing that things have changed. I feel confident this will lead us to our next step.

--When they were giving the election results on Sunday, I pretty much thought that you were in. So, it's possible that, by getting so close, you gave hope to even some LGBT persons out there who had not originally believed it could happen. But now we are left with, to the contrary, how disconcerting it was that you were not elected. But since we now know just how close you can get, that may stir people - even those who didn't think that you could make it at all - to work together under greater solidarity next time.
Do you by any chance know how many votes you got from each region? Like, how many from Tokyo?

O:
I got the numbers for each of the municipalities.

M:
How many did you get from Shinjuku?

O:
It should all be on the homepage for the Tokyo Metropolitan Government. They don't break it down into too much detail, but it's all there.

translated by rayna