Keeping Your Name After the Wedding: Japan’s New Justice Minister Wants Maiden Names on Firm Legal Ground

In Japan, married couples must share one surname, and in the overwhelming majority of cases it is the wife who gives up hers. Many women keep using their old name at work anyway, but that habit lives in a grey zone: accepted on business cards, often awkward with banks, passports and official forms.

New Justice Minister Takashi Yamashita, who also handles gender equality, now says he wants to give the use of maiden names a proper legal basis rather than treating them as mere aliases. In a recent interview he said the details are still being worked out, but suggested the change may not require rewriting the Civil Code or the family register law.

He was careful to separate this from the long-running campaign for a selective dual-surname system, which would let couples legally keep different names. Yamashita called it a serious mistake to see the two as substitutes: even people who happily share a surname may want to keep the name they have used all their lives.

Critics of the government’s approach will say it is a half-step that avoids the harder reform. Supporters will argue that clear rules on where a maiden name can be used would solve real daily problems quickly. Either way, the debate has shifted from whether names matter to how much the law should protect them, and that is a meaningful change in a country where the question has been stuck for decades.