Same-sex marriages are not legal in Japan. However, there is a Japanese Buddhist temple where lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people and members of other sexual minority groups can wed: the Shunkoin temple in Hanazono, Kyoto. Same-sex couples from around the world visit the temple.
Where most priests across the world are extremely conservative and advocate only one kind of family and impose restrictions on people, it is refreshing to see this Buddhist temple make an institutionalised effort to support the LGBT community.
But even the Buddhist community of Shunkoin wasn’t always this open about LGBT rights, as HuffPost Japan reported. So how did they end up conducting LGBT weddings in their premises?
Rev. Taka Zenryu Kawakami, deputy head priest at Shunkoin. admits he was prejudiced against the LGBT community when he was younger. “I am not gay myself, and there were no LGBT people around me when I was growing up. The old me was prejudiced against sexual minorities,” he said.
Kawakami was born into a family that has produced Shunkoin chief priests for generations. After graduating from the Hanazono School (which is affiliated with Rinzai Buddhism’s Myoshinji temple), he studied English at Rice University in Texas, and then enrolled at Arizona State University.
“One day I was having tea with a friend, and a person walked past who you could tell at a glance was gay. I made a discriminatory comment. My friend replied, ‘I’m gay, too. Is that the way you feel about me, Taka?'” Kawakami recounted.
“When he said that, I remembered being discriminated against as an Asian person when I traveled in the South,” he said. “Especially because I had been the victim of prejudice myself, I felt terrible shame, and I completely changed my position. As I changed, my friends began to open up to me about the fact that they were gay or lesbian.”
In 2006, Kawakami finished his training and returned to Shunkoin where the first person to ask about same-sex wedding ceremonies was a woman from Spain who had visited Shunkoin many times to learn about zazen meditation.
“‘Can you hold wedding ceremonies here?’ she asked me,” Kawakami recalled. “I told her, ‘Yes, we can.’ Then she said, ‘I have one more question. My partner is a woman.’ And I responded, ‘That’s fine.'”
Kawakami expected to be criticised for holding the ceremony, but was also sure that his willingness to hold same-sex wedding ceremonies at the temple would support the LGBT cause by paving the way for more acceptance in Japanese society.
“The reasons why LGBT people are not accepted are different in the West than in Japan,” Kawakami said. “In Japan, there is no religious pressure from groups like Christian conservatives. So you don’t see the same sort of strong opposition as in the West. On the other hand, in Japan, there is an underlying pressure to conform, a sense of ‘We are all the same; we are all heterosexual’ — and that makes it hard to live as an LGBT person.”
“I thought that if places such as my temple could show that we actively accept same-sex marriage, it would draw more attention to the problem,” he added.
In 2014, Shunkoin partnered with Hotel Granvia Kyoto to offer Buddhist wedding package tours for LGBT couples. Five couples signed up that year. So far in 2015, eight couples have come to pledge their love, Kawakami said. Six of the couples were from abroad, and two of the couples were Japanese — two men, and two women.
“A lot of the couples are women,” Kawakami added. This seems a long way down the road from Japan’s first gay wedding which was held in 2012.
In India, there have been the rare few exceptions where priests have agreed to perform an LGBT wedding, keeping a low profile. But, by and large, holding an LGBT wedding here is still risky business. Although the LGBT community in India today is much more open, they still hope for the day when an LGBT wedding will be seen to be as normal and magical as anybody else’s.
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