Gender and the Koseki In Contemporary Japan

Surname, Power, and Privilege

Linda White

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9781138674349
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317201069
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Cultural & Social Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

The Japanese koseki system is the legal and social structure keeping record of all Japanese citizens. Determined by the Civil Code and the Koseki Law, for activists challenging it, the koseki is also an ideological structure, which has produced patriarchal control through single-surname households.

Based on ethnographic fieldwork in Tokyo, this book engages with issues of gender hierarchy and structural inequality in Japanese society. Studying several decades of feminist activism and critique of the koseki system, it analyses the strategies of activists who have creatively circumvented koseki rules in order to maintain their natal names in marriage. It examines the case studies of members of the f?fubessei (separate surname movement) and the movement to end discrimination against children born out of wedlock, and in so doing this book illuminates the contradictions in current family law and koseki practice that have animated a generation of feminists in Japan.

Demonstrating the effect of the koeski on family, gender, and national identity, this book will be useful for students and scholars of Cultural Anthropology, Gender Studies, and Japanese Studies in general.

1 The matter of names and why names matter

Nakayama Keiko met me at a lunch spot near Mitaka station, not far from my Kichijoji apartment, on a crisp fall day in 2012 to discuss her koseki and a particular set of family problems that had led her to change her name in the past few years. When Tanaka Sumiko, a key informant, had suggested that I contact Keiko for an interview, she had referred to her as Koyasu-san, not Nakayamasan. However, as we set up the interview it became clear to me that her surname was Nakayama, and as she told me her story of marriage, divorce, and namechanging, I learned why she had changed her name and why there was so much at stake for her regarding her surname. While I addressed her as Nakayama-san in our interview because of the normative use of surnames in such settings in Japan, I will refer to her here as Keiko. The practice of using the surname rather than the given name in many business and formal settings in Japan further reveals the importance of surnames.¹ I have found great variation in use of surname and given name in my experiences in Japan. Terms of address vary somewhat by context and by generation, by region of the country and by family custom, but one can assume until they are told otherwise, that using a surname, as in Suzuki-san, White-san, and so forth, is the most polite and proper thing to do. This practice reveals the linkage between identity and surname (family name) that is broken when women change their names in marriage.

During our interview, the 61-year-old Keiko told me that she came to Tokyo for college in the 1960s, eager to flee the conservative ways of her small hometown in central Honshu, not far from Mt. Fuji, in Shizuoka Prefecture. After discussing the weather, the coffee, and my research agenda, I asked Keiko about her experience with the koseki. She took a deep breath and then launched in. “I had my first child when I was still a student,” she said. “I was only 21.” “I changed to Koyasu. I was happy to do it.” “They say, marriage is a woman’s happiness” (“Josei no shiawase da to”). “After we had the second child and things got bad, I left him.” “I took the boys and left him” (“tobidashita”). This torrent of information came matter-of-factly from the petite and attractive Keiko.

She had married her college boyfriend and dropped out of school when she became pregnant. After her divorce she raised the children alone as a single mother in Tokyo. Keiko told me that although she had wanted to take her maiden name back after the divorce, she was discouraged from doing so. “I am from a small town,” she said. “It is really old-fashioned” (“inaka desu yo”). “People are sensitive about these things” (“Kodawari ga arun desu yo. Dakara, namae mo, modosu nan te, oya, to ka, kyodai ni meiwaku da to iwarete”). “So, I was told that it would create a fuss (cause problems) for my parents and sister if I were to change my name. So I kept his name, Koyasu.” Changing her name back to Nakagawa would have made it clear to family members and members of her small town that she was divorced. Without the name change, no one in the hometown would need to know, she said. This was not the first time that I had been told that changing one’s name after divorce would create problems for other family members and the family’s overall reputation. For some of my informants, a shared marital name seems to prove to the world that a couple is still married, regardless of evidence to the contrary. In an unfortunate and unlikely set of events that pre-empted the following tale, soon after Keiko’s parents died in old age, her sister who had lived near her parents died prematurely. Thus, within a short number of years all of Keiko’s immediate natal family members were gone. As a result, Keiko found herself the sole provider of memorialization rituals for her deceased parents and sister (as well as for the ancestors) back in her rural hometown.

“I was taking care of the family grave in Shizuoka, going there four times a year,” she said. “If I had not done it, no one would have.” “One time I asked the head priest at the temple if I could be buried with my family.” “I said, namae ga chigau kedo ohaka ni hairitai (I know my name is different, but I’d like to be buried here – enter the grave).” “But he told me that because my name was different, I could not be included in the family grave” (“namae ga chigau kara dame”). “Sabishii,” she said, “it is lonely, or it makes me feel sad/lonely.”

I return to take care of the family grave in the countryside four times a year, but if my name is not their last name, I cannot be buried with them. That is why I changed my name back and returned to the koseki last year (dakara kyonen, koseki ni modoshita).

Here we see the interconnected constellation of surname, koseki, lineage, and sense of family belonging, which entails memorialization of the ancestors, that seem to define Keiko’s social location and family membership. She says she felt sabishii for being closed out of her natal family, all the while fulfilling her filial duty to her parents, sister, and ancestors as if she were still a member of that household. Through the process of “returning” to the family koseki and family name she was able to reunite with her family and also anticipate joining them at the temple where their ashes are maintained and revered through regular rituals when she dies. Keiko’s story shows the overlapping spheres of identity, religious/ritual practice, and emotional well-being connected through the koseki document and the name upon which it is centered. Through the legal process of changing her name and re-entering her family koseki she has been able to reclaim family membership in the present and for her own future burial and memorialization.²

Other women I interviewed spoke of myriad problems resulting from giving up their family name and taking their husband’s surname in marriage. Of the 29 in-depth interviews I conducted with non-experts, 11 of the 24 women (there were three men and two transgender) had changed their name at least once. I will address the experiences of the 13 women who never changed their name in Chapter 3 when we consider common-law marriage as a strategy for keeping maiden names. Article 750 of the Civil Code requires that married couples share a common surname. This Article is at the heart of lawsuits over discrimination against women and debates about the meaning of marriage in Japan today since close to 97 percent of all marriages are registered under the male’s surname.³ Of the 11 women who changed their name in marriage, one is a foreigner who married a Japanese man and the other ten are Japanese citizens.

The history of family names

The historical development of family names and family identity in Japan sheds light on the surname debate in contemporary Japanese society. In particular, the linkage between geographical place, social status, group identity, and surname established in ancient times among elites and through the medieval period among samurai shows the tight association of people with their geographical, social, and kin-group identity, an identity that congeals in family name in the modern koseki.

Both male and female interviewees in my study and survey respondents showed a strong sense of belonging to their natal families and a strong sense of identification with their natal names. Correspondingly, female interviewees showed a strong sense of dislocation when required to relinquish their maiden names and assume their husbands’ names. Reporting the dilemma of name change in marriage, one respondent in her mid-forties wrote, “I felt like the person I had been up until then was completely erased” (Survey 128). More than half of the approximately 75 survey respondents who had changed their name in marriage said they had suffered from a sense of loss, erasure, invisibility, or loneliness as they navigated their lives under a new identity.

Through interview and survey material I examined emic understandings of name and identity during ethnographic research in 2012–2013 to unravel the implications of both male-named family units and name-changing on women’s lives. Material from interviews with married women who struggle to find an identity once they have left their natal koseki as well as stories from divorced women who have changed their names more than once, first in marriage and then divorce, expose the incommensurability between women’s name experiences and men’s. These stories reveal assumptions about women’s names as changeable and women’s identities as derivative of relationships within patriarchal frameworks that ultimately produce gender imbalances and fundamental aspects of gender in Japan. How are the women’s experiences different from the experiences of the men they marry and divorce? How does name instability shape the experiences of single mothers or divorced women? Given women’s central role in raising children – whether those women are married, unwed, or divorced – how does name-changing affect their positions as mothers in the world of their children? But first let’s look back to the development of surname use in Japan and consider what names have meant historically.

Naming the Gods, naming the realm: the power of naming

According to Herbert Plutschow (1995), in ancient times, names were understood to be ontically linked to their referents. To speak a proper name was to conjure the thing or person named. Because of this, names, like the revered entities to which they applied, were treated with respect, power, and, sometimes, with fear. From the earliest records, deities of the Japanese islands were given names. The eighth-century Kojiki, creation story of the Japanese archipelago written entirely in Chinese characters by the Yamato elite, recounts the naming of deities who in turn name the other deities and the islands of Japan – creating and naming the islands simultaneously: “[T]hus the last pair of the heavenly eight deities, Izanagi and Izanami, by name, created the following ‘islands’: Awaji (Ogestushime), Sado (Takeyoriwake), Oki (Amenooshikorowake), Tsukushi (Shiraiwake)” (Plustchow 1995: 18). In the Kojiki, naming the islands brought them into physical form. The divine deity’s creative power was manifest through the act of naming.

Early influence from the Asian mainland provided Japan’s elite an orthography, a religious worldview, art, sculpture, and other tools that enabled Japanese society to develop rapidly. One of the many important influences brought from T’ang China in the seventh century was the legal system, known as the ritsuryō. This legal system provided bureaucratic structure and legal codes to facilitate a system of governance that depended on social and political hierarchy based on the Chinese model. The early government kept records of aristocrats, warriors, and others appointed to government positions. According to Plutschow, this meant that “we know much more about the names of the upper than about the lower classes” during this period. (Plutschow 1995: 159). Peasant names were not recorded with any regularity and peasant identities became closely linked to the fields the peasants worked through time. As part of a taxation system, revamped in the tenth century, “the government decided to levy taxes on arable land rather than on people and let these lands be subsumed into often privately owned manors whose administrators were responsible for taxation” (Plutschow 1995). The lands, known under names called myō, were also used to identify the owners or administrators who collected the taxes. Thus, these myō identified land and people working the land as, somehow, one and the same. As Plutschow argues, “the association of peasant with his land was so close that one cannot separate field name and personal name, myō constituting a kind of metonymical identity of both field and cultivator” (Plutschow 1995: 161). The myō tended to be auspicious names that included, for example, the character for rich, tomi as in the surnames Hisatomi and Shigetomi (Plutschow 1995: 161). Those who worked the named land could use the name of that land as long as taxes were paid on the land. These early practices reveal the strong linkage between place and family name, even though that linkage was not yet codified in a register of any kind. The term for the named fields, myō 名 is the first character in one of the Japanese terms for surname, myōji 名字. The character 名 can be pronounced na as in namae, 名前 referring to first name, myō, 名, referring to last name, or mei as part of the compound seimei 姓名 or full name. The Japanese character derived from Chinese suggests the connection between geographical location, in the form of a named field and name of the peasants working the field.

Although these myō were not recorded, they came with some status and continuity, and in some cases, it was possible upon death for a man’s land and the name of the land to be inherited by his son (Plutschow 1995). Although peasants did not officially have surnames, many historical examples reveal commoners using a surname. In fact, “[i]n 1483, the Tō-ji temple (Kyoto) complained that too many peasants had assumed surnames without permission,” suggesting a trend that threatened social stability. Just prior to the Tokugawa period in the late sixteenth century, as part of his campaign to establish strict segregation between samurai and commoners, the powerful daimyō, Hideyoshi Toyotomi, declared a prohibition on the use of surnames for all but the samurai in 1590, “[h]owever correct one’s ancestral history may be, and however rich one may be, people who fell to the status of ordinary people may under no circumstances bear names or swords” ([Chihō Bonrei Roku], in Plutschow 1995: 169). This prohibition on surname use by commoners continued in the Tokugawa period, during which time, concern persisted that surname use by commoners would threaten samurai and shogunal hegemony. In another sign of the significance of names and naming regimes, the people with the most power in society, except the Shogun during the Tokugawa period, were referred to as daimyo, a term written with the characters for big name, 大名.

Although identity during Tokugawa may have been closely linked to land and social class category based on occupational ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction and chapter overviews
• 1 The matter of names and why names matter
• 2 Separate-surname activism
• 3 Common-law marriage as a form of koseki resistance
• 4 Illegitimacy and male privilege: the underlying logic of the koseki
• 5 Beyond the scope of the koseki: families out of bounds
• Epilogue: December 20, 2017
• Appendix I: Association (Kōryūkai) timeline
• Glossary
• Bibliography
• Index