The debate over surnames in Japan has become a surprisingly big sticking point: polls tend to show that the majority of the public want the law to change, but the conservative government is committed to retaining the current situation, where Japanese citizens must change their surnames when they marry so that both members of a married couple have the same name. In practice, this almost always means the woman changes her name to her husband’s. (One loophole around this is to marry someone who isn’t a Japanese citizen, though we doubt the government will actively encourage that!)
The government claims this is to protect the family unit and Japanese tradition, even though the system of surnames and family registers is actually a product of Japanese modernization in the late nineteenth century, making it pretty recent by the standards of most traditions.
Well, how is this for another compromise? Marry someone with the same name.
A new dating service with that aim is set to hold four events in late March and early April in Tokyo. Spring is a time of new academic and financial years, and of the cherry blossom. Will this season of fresh beginnings also lead to romance? The organizers certainly hope so.
The organizations behind the scheme are IBJ Matching, which organizes matchmaking events (and whose brand ambassador is Kasumi Mori), and Asuniwa, which campaigns for separate surnames but, somewhat contradictorily, hopes to bring together people who share the same surname so they can legally marry without either person having to change names.
In other words, this will have absolutely no impact on the current legal system but may allow some people to cope with it better.
In order to get enough pool of candidates each time, we expect events to focus on certain common surnames: Sato, Suzuki, Tanaka, Ito, and so on.
Each event will feature up to 30 people and last 90 minutes. In groups of four (two men and two women), the participants for 15 minutes at a time, and then rotate.
One cool feature is that the food and drink is in keeping with the name theme. So expect chocolates from a shop called Suzukien at the end for people called Suzuki, for instance.
“This project can only help a small number of people,” Asuniwa’s director, Naho Ida, said, according to a report in the Mainichi Shimbun. “What’s really needed is a society where all couples can choose their surname. But instead of just waiting for politics to move, we want to do something cheerful and positive with what we can do right now.”
Asuniwa also teamed up with the dating app Pairs to do a survey of people in their twenties and thirties: 36.6% of women and 46.6% of men responded that they “felt resistant” to changing their own surname after marriage.
The issue of surnames in Japan is not as trivial as it might seem. If people feel resistant to dating and getting married, it means fewer people having families, which is Japan’s biggest social challenge for the future.
