Anywhere but here: Discourses and representations surrounding same-sex marriage in Japanese newspapers

Abstract

Although support for same-sex marriage has grown in Japan, discussions on its legalisation have been slow in the Japanese parliament. To contribute to a more meaningful discussion on this issue, this study uses corpus-driven and corpus-based methods to explore how issues surrounding same-sex marriage are represented in media discourse. It compares two corpora comprising articles from two Japanese national newspapers: the more conservative Yomiuri Shimbun (608,305 words) and liberal Asahi Shimbun (1,681,133 words). The data are from 1 April 2015, when Tokyo's Shibuya Ward started certifying same-sex couples, to 15 March 2024, the day after the Sapporo High Court ruled on same-sex marriage. Keywords, collocation, and concordance analysis are used to identify the differences in discourses and representations, exploring how their opinions on same-sex marriage are explicitly and implicitly delivered. The findings reveal that the Yomiuri Shimbun mostly depicts gay and lesbian people as fictional characters, or foreigners and argues against same-sex marriage in terms of child welfare. In contrast, the Asahi Shimbun considers the issues surrounding LGBTQ+ people to be related to human rights and criticises traditional heteropatriarchal family values as obstacles to advancing same-sex marriage movements and women's rights alike.