Japan dilutes rules obliging married couples to use the same name

Wedding

When two become one

But the piecemeal changes are causing confusion

A YOUNG professional wants to marry the father of her two children. But if she does, one of them would have to take the other’s surname. Japanese law requires married couples to share a family name. That would lead to confusion: they have almost the same first name and work for the same organisation.

Theirs is a rare case. But there are plenty of practical reasons, let alone ones of principle, why people might not want to change their names. Married female employees are often allowed to use their maiden names at work. But the bureaucracy, which has long enforced the law for official documents (for the names both of employees issuing them and of ordinary citizens mentioned in them), is only just beginning to be more flexible.

Female judges have recently been allowed to sign rulings using either their maiden name or their married one. For certain tasks, the patent office is giving workers a choice too. From next year the government will allow people to use their preferred name when dealing with the local council, and perhaps also on their passports from 2019.

A majority of the public reckon married people should be free to choose their surnames, according to polls. The traditional family is still very much the norm in Japan: hardly any children are born out of wedlock, for example, and gay marriage is illegal. But there is a growing sense that some of the conventions surrounding family life are unduly rigid.

The requirement that a married couple share a surname, which dates back a little over a century, is seen by many as entrenching sexism. The law does not specify that it is the wife who must change her name, rather than the husband, but 96% of the time that is what happens. It is no coincidence that the three female justices all dissented against a ruling of the supreme court in 2015 that found that the law did not violate the constitutional right to equality.

But the piecemeal reforms are a muddle. A lawyer can submit documents to a court using her maiden name, but can only register property for clients using her married name, for example. Even if a woman uses her maiden name at work and on various documents, she must still alter it in the koseki, the official register of the population. The koseki, in turn, is the basis for lots of other forms. Married women who use their maiden names often have to complete extra paperwork to prove their identity—no quick task in a bureaucratic country.

“It would be simpler to allow couples to have different surnames on the family register, but this is the conservatives’ last line of defence,” says Yuichi Kaido, a (male) lawyer whose long-term partner is Mizuho Fukushima, a prominent lawmaker and campaigner for reform. Conservatives, many of whom belong to the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), see change as imperilling the family, and a woman’s traditional place in the home.

Some would like to abolish the koseki, which lists people by family unit rather than as individuals. Campaigners point out that each family must name a head of household, who is almost always a man. Women who marry are transferred to their husband’s entry, as if they were property.

“I think it has a strong effect on the mindset of the people,” says Tomoshi Sakka, a lawyer in Okayama, a city in the south of Japan. Next year he will represent a couple challenging the surname law. “It creates the idea that a wife is to follow her husband after marriage.”

Japan is falling behind its neighbors, too. South Korea abolished its family register in 2005 after its supreme court found it discriminatory. China still maintains one, but married women there have never taken their husband’s surname.

Mr Sakka is confident that the law’s days are numbered. But that may not change the convention: even in countries where women don’t have to change their name on marriage, most do. Take Britain, where a survey last year found that 59% of young women want to take their husband’s name (and roughly the same proportion of men want them to do so). That share has not changed in a generation.