Will all Japanese people have the same last name in 500 years?

Japan, a country whose modernity is often praised, also preserves ancient practices which are subject to debate. One of the latest examples: the obligation for married couples to adopt one and the same last name, instead of compound names of both spouses. In 95% of cases, it is the woman who gives up her surname. So the total number of surnames in circulation is decreasing. Will one day, as an academic suggests, in a study published at the end of March, all Japanese people be called Sato?

If the calculation appears fanciful, this hypothesis nevertheless has the merit of pointing out a real problem: that of prohibiting spouses from having a different name. Japan is the only country in this case, because the powerful patriarchal-nationalist fringe of the PLD Liberal Democratic Party, almost always in power since 1955, refuses reform.

“A divided public opinion”

“Within the Liberal Democratic Party, too, there are people in favor of reform, but also others who think it must be debated carefully. This is the reality, defends Fumio Kishida, Prime Minister and president of the PLD. It reflects public opinion itself divided on this issue. We will make a decision on the discussions to be held in Parliament taking this context into account.”

For 30 years, a growing number of Japanese women have been asking to be able to keep their birth name even if they are married, because changing their surname entails tedious administrative procedures and cuts them off from their origins. But the ultra-conservatives of the PLD in power believe that a united family is necessarily made up of a married man and a woman with legitimate children and all bearing the same name, that of the head of the family, a notion which also continues.