Japan court says requiring same surname in marriage is legal

The country’s Supreme Court will decide on Wednesday whether a law that requires spouses to have the same surname is constitutional.

Five plaintiffs filed a lawsuit in 2011 saying the law was unconstitutional, violated their civil rights and put the burden of name change nearly entirely on women.

The law doesn’t specify which spouse’s surname that must be used.

Both sets of laws date back to Japan’s 19th Century Meiji era.

Under the existing law, some Japanese men take their wife’s name on marriage, particularly in cases where the woman has no brothers to inherit the family name.

In practice, many women continue to use their maiden names at work and their legal, married surname in official documents.

However, the court said the law did not violate the constitution, public broadcaster NHK reported.

There is plenty of room for improvement: roughly 65% of Japan’s women are working, which is one of the lowest rates among developed nations. “The system is one that says, basically, if you’re not willing to change, you shouldn’t be getting married”. The percentage in favor of change was higher among younger age groups, with a majority of those over 60 still against it, the paper said. If given the option, more than 70 per cent said they would still adopt one family name. A poll by the liberal Asahi Shimbun newspaper found that 52% of respondents believed couples should have the right to choose, while 34% opposed the move.

Japan is thought to be one of only a few industrialised countries where it is illegal for married couples to have different surnames. Other couples opt out of a formal marriage to avoid changing their name, or undergo a “paper divorce” after having children, while remaining together.

Supporters hope that the government’s “womenomics” push to promote career advancement for women will somehow help their cause, though they are not directly related. People in common-law marriages, however, encounter complications in inheritance and parental rights. A separate ruling that lessened the number of waiting days after divorce from 180 to 100 has not done much to mitigate their fears.

Plaintiffs argued this amounts to gender discrimination.

Lawsuits that sought to highlight the century-old rules as discriminatory and outdated have been filed over the two Civil Code articles.

In a separate decision the court decided that another law, dating from the same period and requiring divorced women to wait six months before remarrying, was in violation of the constitution.