When openly gay independent candidate Wataru Ishizaka campaigned in a 2007 Tokyo local election, people snickered at his speeches. But now even Japan's conservative ruling party mentions gay rights in its platform for this year's Upper House election.
Though the paragraph is deep in the manifesto of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) and refers only to promoting understanding of sexual diversity, even this was unthinkable a decade ago.
By Asian standards, Japanese laws are relatively liberal — homosexual sex has been legal since 1880 — but social attitudes keep the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) community largely invisible.