Japan’s civil war over surnames

FOR A COUPLE that has divorced three times, Uchiyama Yukari and Koike Yukio get along remarkably well. The two teachers, who live in the city of Nagano in central Japan, have never fallen out of love. Yet they have parted several times on paper, in order to sidestep a law that requires married people to have the same surname. Most of the time the couple lives happily outside wedlock. Each time they have a child they remarry (because that makes registering the birth simpler) and then divorce again.

In lots of countries married couples face pressure from society to take a single last name. Japan is rare in making this an obligation under law. In May politicians discussed bills put forward by opposition parties that aimed to change the system. In the end, scepticism from the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) ensured that no new legislation emerged. Yet the missed opportunity has only encouraged campaigners to redouble their calls for reform. Surveys suggest that fuddy-duddy policymakers are resisting what a majority of Japanese want.

The rules in Japan do not explicitly require that a woman take her husband’s name. But in 95% of cases that is how couples choose to comply with the law. “When we got married, everybody assumed I would take his name. Nobody asked if he was going to take mine,” says Ms Uchiyama. This is causing more resentment as women rise in the workplace. Name changes are a pain for people who have toiled to build a strong reputation. Using one moniker for legal documents and another for the office is doable, but invites confusion. Keidanren, Japan’s largest business lobby, says the status quo “hinders women’s advancement”.

Campaigners are not stopping there. They say junking name rules will also help stop uncommon ones dying out. One study notes that, given enough time, everyone in Japan is going to end up sharing the country’s most common surname (“Sato”). “If politicians claim to be conservative, they should be working to preserve rare and unique Japanese names,” says Kono Taro, a reform-minded member of the LDP.

A final argument is that reform could help raise Japan’s rock-bottom birth rate. Morihana Eriko, a 29-year-old in Tokyo, says the thought of giving up her name made her pause before tying the knot (it combines the characters for “forest” and “nose”; only a few hundred people share it). A study conducted by Asuniwa, an NGO, concludes that letting people keep their names might prompt some 590,000 people who are currently cohabiting to switch to legal marriages. In Japan strong stigmas discourage births out of wedlock—so this would probably also serve to make them more fecund.

More than half of Japanese favour relaxing the rule, according to one reliable study. Many politicians also support change. The problem is that reformists in the LDP are loth to challenge the hard-right flank of their party, particularly ahead of an upper-house election in July. Liberalising the rules, hardliners say, would confuse kids and loosen family bonds. At the end of last year Sankei Shimbun, a right-wing newspaper, asked children how they would feel if family members started using different surnames. It reported 49% saying they would not like it.

The issue has become totemic for a chunk of the Japanese political right, says Miura Mari of Sophia University. “The more the public calls for change, the more they’re galvanised to block it.” Married names were a hot topic at a recent gathering organised by Nippon Kaigi, an ultraconservative group with ties to the LDP. Efforts to change name rules might “tear apart traditional values and destroy the country,” one fiery speaker insisted. He called it a “Communist plot”. ■