According to Japantoday, Japan mainly focuses on gay marriage in other countries. For example, they have articles about the protesters in France, Obama attempting to overturn the gay marriage ban and New Zealand looking and working their way to legalizing gay marriage.
The Japantimes is very similar, mainly focuses on the progress of other countries. However, they did contain an additional piece on Uruguay “ok-ing” same sex marriages. There is a small piece on the senator announcing his change of heart due to his son being gay; however, that is a US story, simply covered in Japan. There is also another small piece about a gay rights movie being blurred on Japanese TV. Overall, there isn’t much information on gay marriage or rights specifically in Japan.
I wondered if this was the only country to let gay rights fly under the radar, so I read through ChinaDaily. Very, very similar news stories. This newsite focused on New Zealand supporting gay marriage, the parliament voting in favor of fay rights and is the first country in the Asia-Pacific to do so.
However, the US focuses more on the actual rights progress. The Huffington Post also contains the same stories that the international newsites contained, but has a view additional ones. Such as the gay rallies outside the supreme court. Or about how the LGBT community is looking toward Obama hoping that he would take additional measures, wanting him to be more active.
CNN on the otherhand, simply focuses on their arguments. They don’t sway one way or another, they simply put all sides of the argument to be known.
It isn’t simply Japan, or China, or even the countries in the far east. Much as people lament the state of gay rights in the West it’s still remarkably open and progressive in terms of their attitude on the issue. A lot of the coverage just reflects the cultural outlook and interest of that particular region, and unfortunately gay rights are simply not an issue a lot of countries want to acknowledge or deal with. I’d recommend broadening the scope of your coverage on the issue to places like the Middle East and Africa, though I’d also be interested to see if India or Russia have any particular stance on the topic as well given their semi-Western influences.