In August 2023 Masahiro Shibaguchi, a Japanese Communist Party (JCP) assemblyman in Japan’s Takahama city and his Taiwanese partner, LGBTQIA* studies academic Ariel Ling-chun Liu, flew to Taiwan to register their marriage.[1] Unlike Japan, Taiwan recognises marriage equality, and Shibaguchi became the first Japanese politician to marry as an LGBTQIA* person. Shibaguchi and Liu visited the ruling Democratic Progressive Party’s (DPP) Gender Equality Department in Taipei, where department officials and the deputy secretary-general of the DPP congratulated them. Then Taiwan president Tsai Ing-wen, in office until May 2024, also sent the newly married couple her congratulations.[2]

Liu later told me that they visited the Gender Equality Department unofficially to thank it for its congratulations to Shibaguchi on his Takahama city election victory in April 2023. But, he added, the coverage Taiwanese and Japanese media gave to their marriage generated some positive publicity for Shibaguchi as a local politician in Takahama; Japan’s marriage equality movement, the DPP government, and the JCP, which is active in that movement. One Taiwanese news magazine, Mirror Weekly,[3] described this meeting between a JCP representative, his Taiwanese husband and DPP officials as ‘an alternative democratic exchange’.