Ms - Named

Discussion over Separate Surnames Begins

By Takuya Nishimura, APP Senior Fellow, Former Editorial Writer for The Hokkaido Shimbun The views expressed by the author are his own and are not associated with The Hokkaido Shimbun
You can find his blog, J Update here.
June 2, 2025. Special to Asia Policy Point

Discussion over bills that would allow married couples to use separate surnames has begun in the Committee on Judicial Affairs of Japan’s House of Representatives. Three opposition parties have proposed their own respective bills, none of which has attracted majority support in the House because the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) opposes them. Despite domestic and international requirements for separate surnames, the Diet has failed to give married couples this flexibility.

Amid growing demands and international movements for gender equality, the Legislative Council of the Ministry of Justice released a draft in 1996 of a revised Civil Code to permit separate surnames. “When a married couple use each of their surnames before marriage, they need to decide at their marriage which name their children would use,” according to the draft. The couple themselves would be able to continue to use their unmarried names.

The United Nations Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) issued concluding observations in 2024, in which it recommended that Japan “amend legislation regarding the choice of surnames of married couples in order to enable women to retain their maiden surnames after marriage.” The convention had issued the same recommendation in 2003, 2009 and 2016.

The Japan Business Federation (Keidanren), one of the most influential supporters of the LDP, requested in 2024 that the government of Japan create a selective separate surnames system for women. Women in Japan may and do use their maiden names for business abroad, but legal inconveniences arise in foreign countries since their maiden names have no legal basis and are not described in their passports.

Nevertheless, conservative lawmakers in the LDP have blocked the amendment of the Civil Code, which currently requires a married couple to use one of their surnames, reflecting a concern that separate surnames would destroy the traditional shape of the family. They have not explained, however, how separate surnames will cause a family to collapse. Although some LDP lawmakers understand the necessity of separate surnames, the majority in the party has yet to do so.

With the decline of LDP power in the Diet after the October 2024 Lower House election, the opposition parties have tried to sustain momentum for amendment of the Civil Code. The Constitutional Democratic Party of Japan (CDPJ) submitted a bill in April, which included the suggestions of the Legislative Council in 1996. The Democratic Party for the People (DPP) proposed their own bill that would require a couple, as soon as they married, to register the surname that would be used for their children but that would allow the wife to use her unmarried surname.

The Japan Innovation Party (Nippon Ishin-no Kai) takes more conservative stance. Ishin’s bill would not allow separate surnames but would have a couple create a “common name” in family registration. The LDP decided against submitting their own bill in the current session of the Diet after long internal discussion.

Some conservative lawmakers, including Ms. Sanae Takaichi, argue that using a common name can be an alternative to separate surnames. Komeito favors a system for separate surnames, but thinks it is too early to resolve the issue.

It is not unusual for a Diet member to use their maiden name for their activities. For example, “real” name of Rui Matsukawa (LDP) is Rui Arai. While she discusses policies in the Diet as Rui Matsukawa, she needs to be Rui Arai in family registration or in foreign travel as a Diet member. Giving maiden name a legal status may be a good first step for lawmakers to make their political activities easier.

With no prospect that any one of the three bills from CDPJ, DPP, and Ishin could pass, the Chairwoman of the Committee on Judicial Affairs, Chinami Nishimura (CDPJ), has begun discussions in the committee on the surname issue. Of the 35 seats in the committee, the opposition parties hold 19. Two of the 19 oppose separate surnames. With these two members in dissent, the opposition parties cannot muster a majority to pass a bill.

If the Diet does not pass a bill by the end of the current session, the committee may discard some or all the bills or hold them over the next session. Chairwoman Nishimura reportedly aims to hold votes on the bills to draw a clear contrast between the ayes and the nays. The opposition continues to hold out remote hope that it can persuade enough LDP lawmakers to vote against the policy of their party.

In a May poll by Kyodo News, 71 percent of respondents supported a legal process for selective separate surnames, dwarfing the 27 percent who oppose the idea. Even if no bill passes the Diet, it will be good enough for the opposition: they can show, before the Upper House election in July, that the LDP was unable to deliver legislation favored by the majority of Japan’s citizens.

The ever-shifting sands of Japanese apologies

By Tessa Morris-Suzuki, an ARC Laureate Fellow based at the School of Culture, History and Language, at the College of Asia and the Pacific, The Australian National University and an APP member.

East Asia Forum, 22 February 2016

On 16 February, Australian Foreign Minister Julie Bishop and Japanese Foreign Minister Fumio Kishida signed a ‘Strategy for Co-operation in the Pacific’, in which both countries emphasised their shared values of ‘democracy, human rights and the rule of law’.

As they were doing so, Japanese Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Shinsuke Sugiyama was in Geneva addressing a meeting of the UN committee which oversees the implementation of one of the world’s key human rights accords: the Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW). On the agenda was the Japanese government’s treatment of the problems of memory, justice and redress arising from the imperial military’s mass recruitment of women (the so-called ‘comfort women’) to military brothels during the Pacific War.

It was a great opportunity for the Abe administration to follow up its 28 December 2015 joint statement with South Korea on ‘comfort women’. In the December statement Foreign Minister Kishida acknowledged ‘an involvement of the Japanese military authorities at that time’ and passed on Prime Minister Abe’s ‘sincere apologies and remorse to all the women who underwent immeasurable and painful experiences and suffered incurable physical and psychological wounds as comfort women’.

The December statement committed the Japanese government to contributing to a fund to assist surviving South Korean former ‘comfort women’, but its rather curious wording left some observers unsure just what Japan had apologised for.

Since coming to power the Abe administration has told the world that it is continuing to uphold — or (in the Japanese version) to ‘inherit’ (keisho suru) — the 1993 Kono Declaration. In that declaration, issued after an extensive study by the Japanese government, Japan acknowledged that ‘in many cases [‘comfort women’] were recruited against their own will, through coaxing, coercion, etc., and that, at times, administrative/military personnel directly took part in the recruitments’. The Japanese government also promised to ‘face squarely the historical facts as described above instead of evading them, and take them to heart as lessons of history’.

If the Abe administration has indeed ‘inherited’ the Kono Declaration, one would assume that Abe’s December ‘sincere apologies and remorse’ were apologising for the historical fact that many ‘comfort women’ were recruited and held against their will, and a reaffirmation of Japan’s determination to take the lessons of history to heart.

But oddly, neither Abe nor any of his ministers or spokespeople has ever been heard to echo the key words of the Kono Declaration. Instead, when challenged on the question of state responsibility for the ‘comfort women’ issue, they repeatedly respond with a formula developed during the first Abe administration of 2006–2007: ‘in the documents discovered by the Japanese government, none confirmed the forcible taking away of comfort women’.

This statement is extremely significant. It treats official Japanese government and military documents (the most incriminating of which were deliberately burnt in the closing days of the war) as the only reliable source of information on the topic. It entirely discounts the testimony of surviving former ‘comfort women’. This includes testimony collected and taken into account by the Japanese government at the time of the Kono Declaration. By implication, this formula says to the survivors that their testimony is at best unreliable evidence and at worst lies.

So the key question about the 28 December deal was this: when Foreign Minister Kishida referred to ‘an involvement of the Japanese military authorities at that time’, was he speaking about the involvement of the military in recruiting, transporting and holding women against their will? Was he upholding the promises of the Kono Declaration? If so, then the December accord was indeed a major step forward in Japan–South Korea relations. If not, it starts to look uncomfortably like a move that was motivated less by a desire to bring justice and redress to the victims than to buy their silence.

Foreign Ministry official Sugiyama’s response to the CEDAW committee on 16 February made the answer to these questions disturbingly plain. Pressed on the comfort women issue, he replied ‘in the documents discovered by the Japanese government, none confirmed the forcible taking away of comfort women’. He added that the notion that comfort women had been forcibly recruited was a misconception based on fabricated testimony by a former Japanese labour recruiter named Yoshida Seiji, and that this misinformation had been disseminated by the liberal newspaper Asahi Shimbun, which later retracted the claims.

This statement by Sugiyama is entirely misleading. The Yoshida testimony (which was reported in the early 1990s by almost all the Japanese mainstream media, not just Asahi Shimbun) has been known to be unreliable for more than a decade. And it has had no significant influence on the ‘comfort women’ debate in recent years. More importantly, it is far from the only evidence. The evidence that women were recruited against their will comes from a mass of testimonies from survivors and other eyewitnesses as well as evidence given to war crimes trials and court cases, alongside other historical material.

Australian survivor Jan Ruff-O’Herne, who was marched out of an internment camp and into a military brothel at gunpoint during the war, has never received an apology. Nor have many others forcibly recruited in Southeast Asia and the Pacific.

It is time for Japan’s friends and allies, particularly those like Australia who plan to cooperate with Japan in protecting human rights around the region, to ask the hard questions. Will Prime Minister Abe and his cabinet repeat the words of the Kono Declaration loud and clear? Or will they admit that they have abandoned the declaration? They cannot have it both ways. Sugiyama insisted to the CEDAW committee that the Japanese government is not ‘denying history’. Now we need an answer to the follow-up question: which history are they not denying?