Japan Raises Age of Consent to 16 in Overhaul of Century-Old Sex Crime Laws

The Japanese flag flies in a park in Osaka, Japan, on Oct. 30, 2018. Thomas White/Reuters

Japan’s parliament on Friday passed new legislation that redefines nonconsensual sex as rape and raises the age of sexual consent from 13 to 16 in a major revamp of the country’s century-old sex crime laws.

The new laws outline eight acts that constitute a victim’s lack of sexual consent, including being assaulted while under the influence of alcohol or drugs, or being intimidated by the perpetrator, Kyodo News reported.

The amendments will make filming and distributing people’s exploitative images without consent illegal and increase the statute of limitations for reporting rape from 10 to 15 years, according to the report.

Under the new laws, the age of sexual consent will be raised from 13 to 16, but there would be an exception for adolescents to engage in consensual intercourse with people less than five years older than them.

The latest amendment to the country’s age of sexual consent was the first since 1907 when the lowest legal age was set.

Japan first amended its penal code in 2017 to include harsher penalties for sex crimes, but the laws narrowly define rape as “forcible sexual intercourse.”

Human Rights Watch (HRW) said that rape victims in Japan were reluctant to come forward due to humiliation, citing a 2021 government survey that revealed only about six percent of men and women had reported an assault to the police.

“Survivors have also described how police humiliated and revictimized them while taking their testimony and even tried to convince survivors to drop cases,” said Susanne Bergsten, senior coordinator for HRW Women’s Rights Division.

“As many media outlets have reported, the legal threshold of assault and intimidation also excludes a large portion of cases that have led to acquittals,” Bergsten said in a statement on June 14.

A 2017 report by the government’s gender equality bureau showed nearly 60 percent of rape victims kept it to themselves.

In June 2019, sexual abuse victims and their supporters rallied in nine cities around Japan while holding flowers and placards with slogans such as #MeToo and #WithYou to protest against court acquittals of alleged rapists and urge reform of the nation’s anti-rape law.

The protest came after a court in Nagoya in March 2019 acquitted a father accused of raping his 19-year-old daughter. The judges concluded there was no evidence as to whether she had been unable to resist. The ruling was later overturned in 2020 by a high court which sentenced the man to 10 years in prison.

Japan Approves LGBT Law

Separately, Japan’s parliament passed a new law on Friday to promote understanding of LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer) communities in the country, but activists argue that doesn’t provide any human rights guarantees.

Japan is the only Group of Seven (G7) nation that does not have legal protection for same-sex unions.

People attend the Tokyo Rainbow Pride 2022 Parade in Tokyo on April 24, 2022. Philip Fong/AFP via Getty Images

The initial draft stipulated that discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity should “not be tolerated” but was changed to “there should be no unfair discrimination,” which critics say may tacitly encourage some forms of discrimination.

Japan’s public broadly supports same-sex marriage, according to opinion polls, while local governments in most of the country allow same-sex partnership agreements that fall short of the rights guaranteed by marriage.

“Some 70 percent of the nation allows same-sex partnerships, and surveys have found more than 70 percent of people are in favor of same-sex marriage,” the activist group Marriage for All Japan said in a post on Twitter after the bill passed.

Despite the bill being watered down, some members of Prime Minister Fumio Kishida’s ruling Liberal Democratic Party still broke ranks with party directives, boycotting, or walking out of Tuesday’s vote in the lower house and the final vote in the upper house.

“There have been crimes committed by impersonators in women’s restrooms,” former upper house president Akiko Santo told reporters after boycotting the vote in that chamber.

“It would be a very serious problem if this bill passed and the trend became that it was normal to accept anything,” she said.

Japan has come under pressure from other G7 nations, especially the United States, to allow same-sex marriage.

Reuters contributed to this report.