Gender and Family Values Among Japanese Migrants in Australia: Marital Surnaming

ABSTRACT

Separate marital surnaming (fūfubessei) has been a controversial issue in Japan for many years. Although the Civil Code and the Koseki Law allow the choice of surname for a married couple to be either the husband’s or the wife’s surname, this same legislation prevents a married couple from holding separate surnames. Despite calls for change to allow freedom of choice for couples strengthening in recent years, no progress in this direction has been forthcoming. This study focusses on migrant Japanese married couples in Australia to investigate if their attitudes and behaviour relating to marital surnaming are impacted by living in country where more liberal legislation allows for diverse arrangements for couples. The results indicate that those who have acculturated to life in Australia tend to be more favourably attuned to diverse arrangements than Japanese in Japan. However, those migrant couples less acculturated to Australian life tend to hold on to traditional cultural beliefs. The research also highlights the significant role of filial piety in the choices and attitudes of migrant Japanese couples in Australia.

KEYWORDS:

• Japan
• family
• Australia
• marital surnaming
• gender

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ Legal recognition of parenthood is through family registration. If the parents of a child have separate surnames, they cannot be register together on a new koseki. Therefore, the child would remain registered on only one parent’s koseki which is usually the mother’s koseki. The other parent therefore is not recognised as a legal parent. Moreover, the child would then be registered as illegitimate having only one legal parent.

² The ie (household) system and its ideology reflect a ‘traditional’ patriarchal approach to family structure.

³ Melbourne University Human Research Ethics Committee approval number 1,954,091.1.

⁴ Although Australia has a greater diversity in family structures compared to Japan, patriarchal pressures on women to follow the ‘norm’ and adopt their husband’s last name are far from absent. However, the degree and nature of this pressure is far less than that found in Japan. Moreover, legislation in Australia allows for diversity to not only exist, but to be acceptable.

⁵ Registering a child in Japan requires the child to be entered into the koseki register created by the parents when they marry. Without this newly created registry the child would be entered into the mother’s existing koseki and mistaken for being an ‘illegitimate’ child, for which a strong stigma still remains and for which lifelong serious complications occur for the child (see Chapman, 2018)

⁶ The pronunciation of this surname is similar to the profanity ‘fuck’. Living in an English speaking country with such a surname was deemed risky by the interviewee.

⁷ Jankenpon (rock-paper-scissors) is commonly used in Japanese culture to decide on both serious and frivolous matters that have reached a stalemate or when there is a dispute.

⁸ The term ie carries a wide range of connotations: in addition to the nuclear family (father, mother, children), it signifies the clan, the patrilineage, hierarchy and social norms.