The fight for equal rights for LGBTQ+ people in Japan has in recent years led to efforts to enact a law to promote understanding. After intense debates and revisions in the spring of 2021, the bill was shelved just before the Olympics, despite pressure from national and international organizations such as the International Olympic Committee. In 2023 a revised and potentially ineffectual bill was passed. This thesis aims to analyze the main arguments for and against the bill during the 2021 revision. This is done through critical discourse analysis and Fairclough’s three-dimensional model. The analysis is conducted from the perspective of human rights and gender studies. Articles from two major Japanese newspapers, texts from the homepage of the ruling political party, and tweets by a key LGBTQ+ lobby group are examined. The results show that arguments belong roughly to three groups, 1) arguments for and against the general idea of protection for LGBTQ+ people 2) arguments questioning the content of the bill, e.g., ambiguities in language, and 3) arguments concerning the political questions, such as not to pass this bill to not limit the chances of future more meaningful legislation. Many arguments highlight the patriarchal nature of Japanese society centered on the nuclear family. As the bill has recently been passed, its effect is yet to be seen, but it is probable that the only major impact is to stall future proper anti-discrimination legislation. 

Music has always played an important role in warfare and dissemination of ideological messages. This study is a thematic analysis of a 1969 Japanese nationalistic song called Minzoku no uta, written by right-wing activist Kodama Yoshio. The aim is to offer possible explanations as to the thematic characteristics of the song, and to identify its core message. To this end, the interdisciplinary approach of critical discourse analysis is applied; in order to fully grasp the song's content, the author of this thesis performs a close reading of its lyrics and also produces a translation into English, which is guided by the skopos of documentary translation. The basic framework for the thematic content analysis is provided by a study by Satoshi Sugita (1972), which examines recurring major themes in Japanese war songs (known in Japanese as gunka), produced prior to and during the Second World War. This present study makes a comparison with Sugita's study, in order to determine thematic similarities and dissimilarities between Minzoku no uta and gunka. Gunka have been, and to some extent still are, a relatively unknown subject in English-language scholarship; this should ring even truer for nationalistic postwar songs such as Minzoku no uta. Therefore, the goal of this study is to shed more light on this niche subject. The primary material used in this research is the lyrics of Minzoku no uta, with Sugita's study and Kodama's autobiography Ware yaburetari constituting the most important secondary sources. The results of this study show that "nation" is the most salient theme in Minzoku no uta, which heavily affects how similar to or dissimilar from gunka the song is. The core message of the song seems to be centered around the appreciation and revival of an ideology called "the Imperial Way", known in Japanese as kōdō.