If LGBTQ athletes at the Tokyo Olympics were their own country, they would have ranked seventh in the world, but no Japanese athletes would have been among them.
Airi Murakami (Photo by Shinichi Chubachi)
A top female rugby player, who has earned a cap on the national team, has made it publicly known that she has a same-sex partner.
“There was a time when I kept my sexual orientation to myself,” said Airi Murakami, who plays for the Yokogawa Musashino Artemi-Stars. “But after I met with people who embrace me for who I am, I came to want to behave as my true self and have others know me for who I am.
“I hope to be a catalyst, the next time around, for other troubled athletes, female or male.”
Jun 6, 2021
When Fumino Sugiyama, then a fencer for the Japan women’s national team, decided to come out to one of his coaches as a transgender man, he was not sure what to expect.
What followed shocked him in its brutality.
“You’ve just never had sex with a real man,” the coach responded, and then offered to perform the deed himself, according to a letter that Sugiyama wrote last fall to Thomas Bach, president of the International Olympic Committee.
Sugiyama, 39, who is now an activist, wanted to give Bach an unvarnished picture of the deeply entrenched discrimination in Japan, particularly in the rigid world of sports. He also hoped Bach would lobby the Japanese government on a bill protecting gay and transgender rights. Doing so, Sugiyama wrote, could shield “the next generation of athletes from what I experienced.”
Legislation labeling discrimination “unacceptable” has been blocked by conservative lawmakers, showing how far the country has to go to fulfill the goal of equality enshrined in the Olympic charter.