Speaking at a Sanseito rally in Sapporo’s Odori Park on Saturday, April 18, 2026, party leader Kamiya Sohei told the crowd that schools did not need to teach “weird LGBT” (変なLGBT教えなくていい). A short clip from the speech, cross-posted alongside the 47news headline, showed the remark landing around the 45-minute mark of the broadcast.
The remark slots into a well-documented Sanseito pattern. In September 2025, Naha City Assembly member Wada Keiko likened being transgender to a contagious illness, sparking protests from Okinawan LGBTQ advocates and a rare on-the-record medical rebuttal. The party has also campaigned on reintroducing prewar-style moral education and resisted Japan’s 2023 LGBT Understanding Promotion Law on the grounds that it would encourage children to “choose” an identity.
The 47news post drew roughly 6,000 likes and 2,000 reposts within a day, but the replies tilted sharply against both Kamiya and the outlet itself. Many respondents argued that reproducing the phrase “weird LGBT” as a neutral headline amounts to amplifying hate speech, and that a responsible headline would have quoted the criticism rather than the slur.
hate speech
press framing
By a wide margin, the dominant reply was to call the remark naked discrimination. Respondents used the Japanese loanword ヘイト (hate), the Japanese 差別 (sabetsu, discrimination), and ヘイトスピーチ (hate speech) repeatedly, often paired with demands that Kamiya resign or that Sanseito be dissolved.
A smaller but pointed current in this theme flipped the word “weird” back at Kamiya himself, calling Sanseito the “weird party” whose “weird politicians” should be kicked out of the Diet, and arguing that LGBTQ identity is “simply a natural human variation” while this kind of ignorance is the real strangeness.
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A distinct second thread took aim at 47news itself. Commenters argued that quoting the slur verbatim as the headline, without any framing or critique, amounts to laundering hate speech. Suggested rewrites included “Kamiya’s exasperating attack on diversity” and “Sanseito makes another discriminatory street speech, where does the repeated hate come from?”
This thread cuts across political lines. Some posters who were otherwise hostile to Kamiya still blamed the press for spreading the exact framing he wanted. It echoes a long-running argument in Japanese media criticism about whether outlets should quote or paraphrase inflammatory politician statements.
Roughly a fifth of the engagement-weighted traffic pivoted from the LGBT remark to Sanseito’s other baggage: Kamiya’s comments appearing to excuse “lolicons,” the party’s reported openness to polyamory as a birthrate fix, the fallout from a staffer’s suicide, and the party’s cozy relationship with the Sasakawa foundation and Israeli donors.
These comments function less as direct rebuttals than as reminders. The argument is that this one street speech is consistent with a broader political project many respondents find disqualifying.
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A visible but minority faction agreed outright. This camp argued that LGBTQ identity is a private matter that does not need classroom time, that Japanese society is already tolerant and did not need Western-style DEI curriculums, and that mandatory education would confuse children about “real” sex differences.
Some extended this into birthrate-decline conspiracy talk, claiming LGBT curricula are a globalist plot to reduce Japan’s population. These posters picked up some engagement but were swamped by the broader condemnation.
A small group argued that the one-hour speech had been unfairly clipped, that Kamiya was targeting what he called pushy LGBT “enlightenment activities” (啓発活動) in schools, not LGBTQ people themselves. They pointed viewers toward the full YouTube stream and insisted Kamiya had explicitly said LGBTQ people should not be isolated.
Reply-chain scuffles broke out between this camp and the outrage camp, with critics countering that dressing up the phrase “weird LGBT” with a qualifier does not change the signal it sends to a general audience, especially to LGBTQ kids in the listening crowd.
A smaller but emotionally weighted thread centered on the real-world stakes for LGBTQ youth. Several posters asked directly, “What about the children who are LGBT?” and warned that rhetoric like Kamiya’s raises the risk of bullying and self-harm. Some pointedly tied the remark back to Kamiya’s broader comments about population (“Japan’s population can be half”), arguing the worldview treats some children as expendable.
