Multinationals Seeking Top Expat Talent Battle Anti-LGBT Laws

For Alexander Dmitrenko, 42, it was a purchase to cement the ties to his adopted home. He’s spent most of his career crossing borders: An ethnic Ukrainian born in Russia, Dmitrenko has graduate degrees from universities in Budapest, New York, and Toronto, and he’s an attorney for Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer, a law firm with headquarters in London. For the past four years, he’s specialized in corruption investigations from the firm’s Tokyo office. “I love Japan with all my heart,” he says, which is one reason he bought a vacation home on a remote island about an hour by plane from Tokyo.

Yet there was a problem. To purchase home insurance, he needed a next of kin living in Japan. Dmitrenko is gay and has a partner, but as far as the insurer is concerned, he has no local relative, because the government doesn’t recognize same-sex unions. “So I have no insurance,” he says. In a country that is earthquake-prone, that’s bad enough, but Dmitrenko says it’s just one instance of the daily doses of discrimination he and his partner face. “There are whole areas of rights where we are invisible in the law,” he says. “It hurts.”