In 2013, after the U.S. Supreme Court effectively legalized same-sex marriage in the United States, I asked a friend who lived in California if he planned to marry his long-term partner. My friend said that he would but only because his partner wanted to. He himself didn't seem to care, since California already guaranteed legal protections for domestic partnerships and he wasn't particularly enamored of the institution of marriage. However, if the man he loved had his heart set on it, then there was nothing he could do about it.
I thought about my friend when I read about the two recent Japanese court decisions regarding same-sex marriage and how these decisions could make it legal in Japan — the only Group of Seven country where such unions are not legal. A number of local governments have enacted ordinances that allow for LGBTQ couples to register as domestic partnerships in order to receive some of the benefits that married couples enjoy, but without a national law that normalizes wedlock for LGBTQ couples, such ordinances can only do so much.
What's meaningful about these court decisions is that while they recognize that Japan shouldn't deny LGBTQ couples the same benefits that married heterosexual couples enjoy, such matters must be legislated. A March 18 editorial in the Sankei Shimbun disputed the decision in one of the cases, in which three same-sex couples sued the state in Sapporo District Court, saying their inability to marry violated Article 14 of the Constitution, which guarantees equal protection under the law. The court rejected the plaintiffs' claim for compensation but said that denying them the right to marry did indeed violate the Constitution. The plaintiffs deemed this a victory, since the compensation gambit was merely a means of getting the court to address the constitutionality question.