A high-profile call by Japan’s biggest corporate lobby for legal changes to allow couples to keep separate surnames after marriage has raised hopes of reform to a system that has long disadvantaged women and makes the country a global outlier.
The influential Japan Business Federation—Keidanren—the country’s main big business lobby with more than 1,500 corporate members and long a staunch backer of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP)—on June 10 unveiled its proposal, calling on the government to quickly submit the needed legal changes to parliament.
The debate over surnames coincides with the World Economic Forum’s latest report showing Japan still lags globally in gender parity, ranking 118th among 146 countries, despite more than a decade of government-led efforts to promote women’s empowerment as an engine of economic growth.
Japan’s legal requirement that married couples adopt the same surname dates back to the former Civil Code of 1898, which also introduced a patriarchal family system under which a wife entered her husband’s family unit and hence, took his surname. A new Civil Code adopted in 1947 after Japan’s defeat in World War II stipulated that couples could theoretically choose either the husband’s or wife’s name, but in practice, some 95 percent of married couples opt for the man’s name.
Public opinion has shifted in recent years, with a majority now favoring revising the law to make the change optional. But staunch conservatives in the LDP may not drop their opposition to the change, a move they argue would threaten family unity and erode what they see as traditional values.
“It all depends on the power struggle in the LDP,” said Mari Miura, a political science professor at Sophia University, who like many married women, uses her premarital name professionally but must use her husband’s surname on certain legal documents.
The LDP is in disarray ahead of a September party leadership poll that will decide whether Prime Minister Fumio Kishida—his ratings at record lows after a widespread party funding scandal—can win another three-year term ahead of a lower house election that must be held by October 2025. The Keidanren handed its proposals to three cabinet ministers on June 28.
“Amid an advance in women’s empowerment and an increase in female executives and employees, the issue of surnames cannot be dealt with as a problem for individuals, but is becoming a business risk,” Keidanren Chairman Masakazu Tokura told a June 10 news conference.
Although an increasing number of married women use their premarital name at work, nearly 90 percent of female executives surveyed by Keidanren said they were disadvantaged by the clash with their legal surname, citing issues such as a mismatch with bank accounts, credit cards, airline tickets and hotel reservations, and an inability to sign contracts with their professional surname.
“Regardless of gender, a person’s surname is an expression of their character and for professionals, it means their career itself, their achievements, credibility and the personal connections they have built up,” the business lobby said.
Keidanren’s about-face on surnames reflects an uptick, albeit small, in the number of female executives in its own corporate ranks along with growing pressure from investors for increased diversity in senior posts and board rooms and companies’ need to attract more female talent, experts said. Women accounted for just 13 percent of managers at private firms compared to a May 2024 International Monetary Fund report, well below the Organisation for Economic Cooperation average of 34 percent.
“Keidanren’s statement shows more emphasis on how they are viewed by global society,” said Machiko Osawa, professor emeritus at Japan Women’s University. “Japanese corporations have to align with global standards.”
Japan is the only country to require married couples to share the same surname and a growing number of its citizens—62 percent in a recent survey by public broadcaster NHK—favor allowing separate surnames as an option.
Debate over surnames dates back decades. In 1996—a decade after an Equal Employment Opportunity Act was implemented—a justice ministry advisory panel proposed revising the law to allow separate surnames. The ministry drafted bills to make the change at least twice in subsequent years, but the changes were never submitted to parliament due to opposition from within the LDP.
The Supreme Court in 2015 and 2021 ruled against plaintiffs who argued the law is unconstitutional, although several justices dissented and the Court said it was up to parliament to debate whether to revise the statute. Reflecting changing public sentiment, former Supreme Court Justice Ryoko Sakurai said a different judgment could be handed down when the court rules on a fresh lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the law filed in March 2024.
“It is a hopeful observation, but there is a possibility [the law] will be ruled unconstitutional, or something close to it,” Sakurai, who wrote a dissenting opinion to a 2015 ruling upholding the law, told Keidanren in a lecture in May. Sakurai herself had to stop using her premarital surname professionally and use her husband’s name when she became a justice in 2008, although that requirement has since been changed.
The LDP itself is divided on the issue, while its junior coalition partner as well as the biggest opposition party support revising the law. In early 2021, LDP parliamentarians both for and against the change set up dueling groups to promote their stances. Kishida was a key member of the group in favor of revision, while former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, who had stepped down in 2020 but retained substantial clout until he was shot to death by a lone assailant in 2022, was a powerful opponent.
In face of the divide, party discussions stalled, and Kishida watered down his support for a change when he ran successfully for LDP president and hence, prime minister, in September 2021, reflecting his need to win support from Abe and other LDP opponents to dual surnames in the party poll. Nudged by the Keidanren proposal, the LDP is reviving a “working team” to restart discussions, but internal jockeying ahead of a looming party leadership poll in September is clouding the outlook.
Kishida, who has stuck to a cautious stance on surnames since winning the top job, is facing calls from within the party not to seek a second term as LDP president, given that not only his personal ratings but those of the LDP itself are at fresh lows. Several other potential candidates, including former defense minister Shigeru Ishiba and former environment minister Shinjiro Koizumi, have in the past expressed support for changing the law, but could change their tune to attract support from ultra-conservatives in the leadership race, political experts said.
“For those who have opposed the change despite rational reasons for it, it is close to a belief or religion,” said Akiko Orita, a professor at Kanto Gakuin University. “I think that as long as they have clout, they won’t change,” added Orita, who, with her husband, is among the small minority of couples who have adopted the woman’s surname.
Successive Japanese governments have paid lip service to increasing female empowerment, but it was the conservative Abe who made a push to get more women into the workforce to promote growth—so-called “womenomics”—a key agenda during his second 2012-2020 tenure as prime minister.
But while women’s participation in the labor force rose to 74 percent in 2022 from 63 percent a decade before, more than half are in lower paid part-time and contract jobs, and efforts fell far short of a target to increase women’s share of leadership posts to 30 percent by 2020, forcing the government to move the goalpost to 2030. Men still hold five out of six leadership roles, the World Economic Forum report found, while only 11 percent of the members of parliament’s powerful lower house are women and the country has never had a female prime minister.
A variety of factors lie behind Japan’s persistent gender gap, including cultural norms that see women as primary caretakers of children and elderly, tax and social welfare policies that encourage women to limit their working hours by taking non-regular jobs, and the under-representation of women in politics, where conservative views in the ruling party are out of sync with many voters.
Advocates say allowing separate surnames for married couples would send an important message that broader socio-economic changes are possible, advocates said. “It would breakdown a sense of stagnation by showing that old traditions can change,” Kanto Gakuin University’s Orita said. “It would become a symbol that Japan can really change.”
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