No more “
ladies and gentlemen
” on Japan Airlines (JAL) flights: the Japanese airline has announced that its announcements on planes and in airports will adopt a gender-neutral language from October 1.
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"
JAL will ban gender expressions
" and use neutral greetings like "
hello
" or "
good evening
", a spokesperson for the company told AFP on Monday.
The announcement concerns languages other than Japanese, for which the vocabulary usually used in these situations is already neutral, he said.
This decision would be a first among the major Japanese airlines.
ANA Holdings, a competitor of JAL, for its part assured AFP that it wanted to “
study the issue based on customer opinions
”.
JAL has also changed its rules so that same-sex couples can enjoy the same preferential rates as families.
Same-sex marriage is not legally recognized in Japan, but the government has gradually extended protection for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people in recent years.
However, the LGBT community has been campaigning for several years for their rights to be better recognized in the country.
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Last year, 13 same-sex couples launched legal actions against the Japanese government, claiming unconstitutional its refusal to recognize their unions.
