The Tokyo District Court on Oct 29, 2026 ordered a Kofu city assembly member to pay ¥1.1 million in damages for outing the Akutagawa Prize-winning author Li Kotomi as transgender on social media, the Asahi Shimbun reported.
Li, who was born in Taiwan, underwent the legal procedure to change her registered gender to female and moved to Japan in 2013. She won the Akutagawa Prize, Japan's most prominent literary award for new fiction, in 2021. Posts revealing that she is transgender then spread on social media.
Presiding Judge Yohei Motomura found that Yumi Muramatsu, the assembly member, posted on Facebook in May 2024 that Li "has a male body and hasn't had surgery. A woman with a male body who is a lesbian." Muramatsu also shared a third party's post containing Li's name from before her gender transition and a photograph of her from her high school years.
The court said the posted material was "closely tied to the plaintiff's physical sex and gender identity, and the need to keep it private is high. There was no reasonable grounds for making it public." It found that Muramatsu had illegally invaded Li's privacy.
Request to block future posts rejected
Li's side had also asked the court to bar Muramatsu from making further statements about her gender. The court dismissed that request, saying it could not be recognized that illegal posts by Muramatsu were "clearly anticipated."
The suit had sought ¥5.5 million in damages along with the injunction. The ruling awarded a fifth of that sum.
Li has written publicly about being outed and about facing online abuse. In a previous interview with the Asahi Shimbun, she said, "Words can kill people, and they can save them."
Outing and Japanese law
Japan has no statute that specifically criminalizes outing someone's sexual orientation or gender identity. Claims of this kind are typically brought as civil suits over privacy or defamation, and courts weigh whether the information was private and whether publishing it served a legitimate purpose.
Muramatsu holds a seat in the Kofu city assembly in Yamanashi Prefecture, west of Tokyo. The ruling against her is a civil judgment, not a criminal conviction.