Tokyo Rainbow Pride [ja] in 2016.The LGBTQ community in Tokyo is one of the largest in Asia. While Japan does not assign as much moral or social weight to sexuality as in the West, it is still difficult for Japanese people to come out in society as being LGBT; the community reportedly experiences homophobia even amongst those in the community. Only 5% of Japanese people report they know somebody who is LGBT.
There is a community in Japan called Stonewall that aims to serve the LGBT community, with many local chapters spread across Japan. Stonewall provides educational awareness, useful information, communicative online platforms, and fellowship opportunities. (Full article...)
Image 14Picture of the Upper Class, a c. 1794–1795 painting by Utamaro. The woman on the left is lower in class than the woman on the right, who wears more colorful clothes (from History of Tokyo)
Image 26The five-story pagoda of Kan'ei-ji, which was constructed during the reign of Tokugawa Hidetada and required the building of the Kimon (Devil's Gate) (from History of Tokyo)
Image 28A social hierarchy chart based on old academic theories. Such hierarchical diagrams were removed from Japanese textbooks after various studies in the 1990s revealed that peasants, craftsmen, and merchants were in fact equal and merely social categories. Successive shoguns held the highest or near-highest court ranks, higher than most court nobles. (from History of Tokyo)
... that the first line to STU48's "Hana wa Dare no Mono?", which imagines a world without borders, is often misheard as wishing for a world without Tokyo?