Toward a society where you can
pursue who you are, safely.

Are we doing what we actually want to do? Are we really living as ourselves?

People have been talking about work-life balance for a long time now, but in Japan the damage from the life side of that balance breaking down is surfacing everywhere.

Overwork and burnout are no longer unusual. Marriages and births keep falling. The total fertility rate keeps setting new lows. Divorce stays high, sexless marriages and couples living separately under one roof keep increasing. Loneliness and isolation have become social problems serious enough for the government to appoint a minister for them. Are these not the obvious side effects of a society that praises only working hard, and treats pursuing who you are in your own life as an afterthought?

What is taken for granted at work as self-realization is somehow hard to talk about in life. On top of that: marriage should look like this, couples should behave like that, men should be this way and women that way. As long as we are bound by inherited roles, pursuing who you really are in your own life stays difficult.

It varies from person to person, but at the center of life there is often a partner or someone close. Before the company or the country, there is the smallest society of all, built by just one or two people. We believe that is where a person can feel safe enough to be themselves.

I think that human beings are, fundamentally, kept alive by desire. Alongside the basic drives of sleep, food and sex, there is the wish to be recognized, the wish to be loved by someone, the wish to express oneself. The forms differ, but all of us are moved by some kind of desire.

And behind that desire there is almost always something underneath that we want to fill. To fill a loneliness. To confirm that we exist. To have someone accept us exactly as we are. What surfaces as desire is only a small part of what lies beneath it. What we care about is precisely that deeper layer.

Living in society, we all have to wear a social mask to some degree. But at least inside the smallest society — at least toward the one person beside us — we could take that mask off, find the courage to show a little of what we have kept hidden, and receive what the other person reveals without denying it. If we had a society where both sides made that effort, would there not be more happy people in it?

Luna faces head-on a field — kink and fetish — that has long been treated as something you cannot tell anyone, and pushed outside of society. Yet what cannot be said is often an important part of the person. What Luna works on is refusing to deny that. It is continuing to build places where people can face it safely, and connect with someone else.

What we work on may look like running a dating app, but we see it as continuous with the structures across society that make life harder to live. Divorce, sexless relationships, loneliness, rigid gender roles, the sense of not being able to live as yourself — these problems are deeply connected to what Luna is working on.

We would like to take this subject up with journalists, in its full social context, and bring it into wider view. Reporting, features, interviews, columns, documentaries, podcasts — in whatever form, we would be glad to hear from anyone willing to carry this conversation further with us.