In Japan, the decades-long debate over allowing married couples to keep separate surnames has become a political stalemate, exposing deep divisions within the ruling party
In Japan, the question of whether married couples should be allowed to keep separate surnames is not just a matter of bureaucratic formality. It is, as reporter Nao Sakata writes in Chihei, a test of political nerve, a wedge in the ruling party, and a reminder that sometimes in politics things move excruciatingly slowly or not at all.
On a grey February morning, members of the Liberal Democratic Party’s “Working Team” filed into a closed-door meeting room in the Diet (Japan’s parliament). Their task: to decide what, if anything, the party might do about the nearly three-decades’-old proposal to amend the Civil Code. “We would like to take into consideration both diversifying values and traditional family systems,” Chairman Aizawa Ichiro began, offering the kind of preamble designed to offend no one and satisfy even fewer. Inside, Chihei reports, it was less a debate than a stalemate. Proposals had been written but not shared; a senior member confessed to avoiding conversations altogether, fearing they might be seen as taking sides.
Today’s gridlock has a long tail. In 1996, after five years of study, the Legislative Council recommended legalising optional separate surnames. The bill never reached the Diet floor – an almost unheard-of fate – thanks to fierce resistance inside the LDP. Since then, the measure has been introduced 26 times, only to be shelved, withdrawn or quietly expire. The LDP, now in the minority, remains split between those invoking tradition and those citing the practicalities of modern life. One party insider dispensed with niceties: “A compromise is obviously impossible.”
But beyond the Diet, patience is wearing thin. Surveys suggest that nearly 600,000 couples are waiting to marry until the law changes. Advocates point to Japan’s record-low fertility rate – 1.15, the lowest since data collection began in 1947 – and warn that obstacles to marriage are obstacles to addressing demographic decline. On 11 June, labour unions and civil-society groups arrived at the Diet with 630,000 handwritten signatures, heavy in both ink and implication. “We don’t want this human rights issue to become a political issue,” said Yoko Sakamoto, president of m-Net, a nonprofit that has been pressing the case for years.
Original article (“夫婦別姓を「問題」とするのは誰か”) by Nao Sakata was first published in Japanese on 7 July 2025.
It is available here.
Chihei is an imprint of Chiheisha, a Tokyo-based publishing house founded in early 2024 in Jimbocho, the city’s historic book district. Its team, drawn from across publishing and media, began releasing books in April and launched the monthly magazine Chihei 地平 (“Horizon”) in July 2024. In Japanese, the name evokes earth, paths and perspective – and, written in kanji, carries the wish for peace on earth, a principle at the heart of the company’s mission.
Summary by TMH
