Liberal Democratic Party lawmaker Mio Sugita is being criticized for comments she made about how LGBT individuals should not receive government “support” because, biologically speaking, they can’t have children and are thus “unproductive” as members of society. Although the media have covered her remarks and the backlash, they’ve avoided the elephant in the room — the fact that Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, Sugita’s mentor, has no offspring himself. It’s nobody’s business why Abe and his wife are childless but, as political science professor Jiro Yamaguchi asked in a July 29 Tokyo Shimbun column, can Sugita say to Abe’s face that his administration should withhold support for childless citizens?

Sugita’s LGBT stance is one component of her defense of the so-called traditional Japanese family, her main agenda as a public figure. In this capacity, her wildest assertion, made in a July 4, 2016, Sankei Shimbun column title “Mio Sugita’s Nadeshiko Report,” is that the Japanese day care system is part of a scheme by the Communist International to “brainwash” children and “destroy the Japanese family” by popularizing separate names for married couples and support for gender-free issues. The Communist International was a global movement to spread communism, and it officially ended under orders from Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin in 1943, but certain people feel it’s still active as a kind of lingering, insidious cabal.

The Japanese family is codified in the family register (koseki), which effectively makes separate names illegal and identifies interrelational traits, such as legitimacy and succession, for all to see and for the rest of the individual’s life. In effect, it is really the koseki that brainwashes by establishing in Japanese people’s minds a rigid family structure.