The following article was written by Masako for the July-September 1996 issue of the English-language Japan Quarterly, which is no longer published. We are posting it here because we think it offers some useful background for the never-ending debate over whether Japanese married couples should be allowed to use separate surnames for legal functions. The article is about the family registration system, the koseki, and offers not only a brief history of the document, but a summary of its use in a practical sense. Since the article was published, certain changes have taken place in the Civil Code, and we have added updates to the story where they apply. These updates are provided in brackets. However, the article itself is here recreated exactly as it appeared in 1996, so that readers can get some sense of how much progress has been made. For the most part, not much; and as Masako implies throughout the piece, a lot of the process surrounding changes made in the koseki depends on the individual civil servant who carries it out at the counter. Consequently, some of the matters explained here that were contentious at the time have become less so due to a looser attitude on the part of front-line officials; but, in theory, the koseki hasn’t changed very much since 1996, and the surname issue, which is directly linked to the bureaucratic primacy of the koseki, is just as contentious now as it was when the article was written, if not more so. For a detailed and very readable discussion of the legal aspects of the koseki, we recommend the 2016 series that Colin P.A. Jones wrote for The Japan Times. We should also mention that Sato Bunmei, who talked to Masako at length for this article and was probably the most knowledgeable person at the time about the koseki, has since died.

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