A Japanese family court has ruled that the country’s requirement that transgender people be surgically sterilized to change their legal gender is unconstitutional. The ruling is the first of its kind in Japan, and comes as the Supreme Court considers a separate case about the same issue.
Japan is extremely conservative in certain ways, usually because of their focus on conformance to social norms.
I encountered gay men not-infrequently while I lived there, and Japanese people are (for the most part) fine with them even if uncomfortable, but from a legal standpoint, Japan mostly prefers to pretend the LGBT+ community doesn’t exist, and can be very hostile towards it when it’s forced to acknowledge them (such as in medical contexts).