Following the release of its first edition in 1955, publisher Iwanami Shoten’s Kojien has become one of the most respected and widely used dictionaries in Japan. Since 1998, the tome has been on a 10-year update cycle, and so last week’s release of Kojien’s seventh edition was a big deal not just for linguists, but for Japanese society in general. However, not more than a few days after it went on sale on Jan 12, criticisms have arisen regarding one of the new book’s definitions. Among the terms added to the seventh edition is “LGBT,” and not an equivalent using indigenous Japanese linguistic components. The four-letter acronym appears in the book as “LGBT,” just like it would in an English dictionary.