Last Friday, the Japanese Diet took up the issue of separate names for married couples for the first time in 28 years. Though the debate about bessei—allowing partners who wed to retain their individual birth surnames rather than forcing them to choose one—has been around for the last 30 years at least, the topic has not been discussed in the national assembly owing to the ruling Liberal Democratic Party’s stubborn refusal to countenance any change to family law, saying that allowing separate surnames would undermine the integrity of the Japanese family, despite the fact that almost every other country in the world allows married couples to use separate names legally and the Japanese business community, which is hardly a bastion of liberal thought, has urged the government to change the Civil Code to permit separate names. 

The bill that would change the law is being sponsored by the opposition, which is no guarantee it will pass, but the fact that the matter is being discussed brings the possibility as close to reality as it’s ever been. One aspect that will likely be covered in the debate is the effect the bill would have on Japan’s notoriously low birth rate. Many couples do not marry simply because they want to retain their birth names, and thus if they have children as common law couples those children will be deemed illegitimate in the family register and thus in the eyes of the authorities, a status that still carries a stigma. 

According to an April 21 article in the Tokyo Shimbun, a survey conducted by an organization called Asuniwa, which is lobbying for passage of the bessei bill, found that about “half the people nationwide who would be affected by the bill’s passage,” meaning, presumably, people in common law relationships, said they would legally register their union if it does pass. More significantly, 60 percent of this demographic who are in their 20s said they would marry. The survey, which was conducted in March, was complied by Keio University Associate Professor Yuichiro Sakai, who told Tokyo Shimbun that he received responses from 1,600 people in common law relationships and unattached singles, and 49.1 percent said they would be willing to marry if the bill passes. By applying this rate to the general population, within which he calculates 1.226 million people are currently in common law relationships, that means passage of the bill could result in some 587,000 people becoming legally wed who are not wed right now. About 30 percent of the respondents cited “I don’t want to change my name” as the reason for not being married. 

Though the article does mention in passing that people in common law relationships are “hesistant to have children,” it doesn’t ponder the effect that passage of the bill would have on the birth rate. 

It also doesn’t discuss the stigma of illegitimacy, which is probably the main reason for the above-mentioned “hesitancy.” However, a recent article in the Korean newspaper Chosun translated into Japanese reported that a research organization which studies policies related to women’s issues discovered that over the last ten years “the number of people who support unwed women in their 20s and 30s giving birth” has increased significantly. The survey was requested by the government in order to figure out if Korea’s birth rate, which is even lower than Japan’s, could be raised by removing the stigma of illegitimacy from children born out of wedlock. 

Korean society is not necessarily more open-minded about gender relationships and the status of women than Japan is, but related prejudices mostly have to do with a vocal male element that sees women’s rights as impinging on its own sense of privilege. The government, in fact, has done more to advance women’s rights in Korea than the Japanese government has done for Japanese women; and this attitude carries over to gender relationships. Following World War II, Korea retained the family register system foisted upon its people by the Japanese colonial authority, despite the fact that Korean civic culture demanded that couples have separate names. In the past few decades, however, the government has thrown off the family register and introduced a registration system based on the individual, which implicitly gives women more independent agency in their lives. Similarly, the government’s interest in gauging the public’s attitude toward children born out-of-wedlock is seen as both progressive and self-serving—the main impetus is to remove the stigma so that more children will be born. 

Ironically, the survey shows that it is men who have become more accepting of children born out-of-wedlock. In 2008, 32.4 percent of men in their 20s surveyed said they would support out-of-wedlock births. By 2024, this number had increased to 43.1 percent. In contrast, for women in their 20s, the rate went from 28.4 percent to 42.4 percent. The same trend was seen for people in their 30s: support from men went from 28.7 percent to 43.3 percent; for women, from 23.9 percent to 40.7 percent. In line with this increase, there was a noted rise in general support for common law relationships. In 2024, about 80 percent of both genders approved of common law relationships.

Another telling statistic is that in 2022 the portion of births that occurred out-of-wedlock in Korea was 3.9 percent, a rate that increased to 4.7 percent in 2023. Among OECD countries, the out-of-wedlock birth rate is 41 percent, so Korea’s is still very low, but a 0.8 percentage point rise over two years is statistically large. 

Consequently, Chosun says that “recognition of children born out-of-wedlock is becoming more widespread,” a trend that will likely compel the government to study policies to “support” ummarried people who decide to have children. One researcher told the newspaper that women who contemplate having children outside of marriage, whether they are in a common law relationship or not, think that by doing so they can avoid the pressure from in-laws and general society that usually comes with raising children in a legally recognized relationship. But in order for such a sea change in public attitude to occur, the government would need to address current inheritance laws and tax exemption status rules. The social safety net as it stands is not strong enough to support single mothers and their children.

But Chosun is clear that the impetus behind such surveys and policy decisions is a desperate desire to raise the overall birth rate. Unwed motherhood as a means of boosting the birth rate is not being discussed at all in Japan, which is just as desperate to produce more babies. Interestingly, we found that Japan’s so-called illegitimacy rate is currently equal to that of Korea’s—4.7 percent—which means that many people have also undergone a change in attitude toward children born out-of-wedlock, however slight. Until around 2010 the illegitimacy rate was steady at around 1 percent. However, we could find no discussion of this rise in out-of-wedlock births in the Japanese media at all. It should be noted that the Japanese language Chosun article referred to unmarried people as “hikon,” which means “not married,” rather than “mikon,” the word the Japanese media normally uses to refer to unmarried people but which means literally “not yet married.” It’s a telling difference. Out-of-wedlock births may not be the hottest topic in Korea, but at least the press is looking into it. Here, it still seems to be either taboo or something that just doesn’t occur to Japanese editors.