A couple who failed in an attempt to register their same-sex marriage in Japan vowed on Friday to take legal action to force the country to legalize gay weddings. Ai Nakajima and Kristina Baumann, who live in Yokohama, near Tokyo, attempted to register their marriage with local authorities on Wednesday after marrying in Germany last year. “We don’t want anything special – just the same rights as any other married couple,” Baumann, who is German and studying in Japan, told the Thomson Reuters Foundation by phone. Japan’s laws on LGBT+ issues are relatively liberal compared with many Asian countries, with homosexual sex legal since 1880, but being openly gay remains largely taboo.