As the nation gradually addresses human rights issues involving sexual minorities, including whether to recognize same-sex unions as legitimate marriages, the changes are stirring a sense of crisis in some politicians.
A member of the Gifu Prefectural Assembly held a news conference Friday to withdraw a jeer in which he called gay people "abnormal," but also said he is having "a sense of crisis that homosexuality might go around in the entire society."
Liberal Democratic Party Assemblyman Mamoru Fujitsuka, 74, used man-en, a Japanese word usually used to describe when something negative, like a contagious disease, is spreading, to express his anxiety about gay people.