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.