Getting Divorced Over an Illegal Hyphen?

In a typical marriage, when someone says, “we’re getting a divorce,” it’s not great news. It’s usually heartbreaking, messy, or at least deeply complicated. But for one married couple in Hachioji, a suburb of Tokyo (here’s a map), it’s more like clockwork. Every three years or so, they get divorced. And then, just as predictably, they get remarried.

They’re not indecisive. They’re not fighting — well, not in any meaningful way. They just can’t decide on what last name to use. And it’s not really their fault.

When a couple gets married, it’s common for the woman to take her husband’s last name as her own. But that’s become less common as women have gained equal rights to men. In developed nations, in particular, women often enter the workforce before they get married, establishing a professional reputation under their maiden name. If they marry, it makes sense for them to keep their maiden name as their legal name; it helps them maintain that reputation and makes it easy for their professional connections to stay connected with them.

But in Japan, that’s not so simple. As the Guardian explained in 2024, “Japan is the only country in the world that requires spouses to use the same name.” Couples can choose which surname to use (or adopt a new name), but in practice, the vast majority of couples — 95% — use the husband’s name post-vows. In their professional lives, many of these women continue to use their maiden names informally, but that causes all sorts of problems; for example, one executive told the Guardian, there are stories of “ female executives who had been locked out of hotel rooms or denied admission to meetings on overseas business trips because their ID didn’t match their surname.”

In 2016, one Japanese couple found a way around this problem — they’d take turns adopting the other’s last name from birth. (The couple’s names have gone unreported to protect their privacy, as is common in Japanese journalism.) According to The Mainichi, “The woman began by saying that she did not want to change her surname. She was called by her close friends by a nickname that was a play on her last name, and so she was attached to it. The man responded with, ‘Don’t women normally change their surnames to the guys’?’ which led to a fight. After graduating, the two started working and their marriage talk became increasingly realistic. One day, during some small talk at work, the man heard of a couple who alternated surnames every three years, a story he then told the woman. The two decided they would do the same thing, and in 2016, had a wedding. They drew straws on their honeymoon in Vienna, and went on to use the husband’s surname for the first three years of their marriage.” But there was no legal mechanism to do so — the courts didn’t allow for name changes like this.

The solution: get divorced, and then get remarried. The marriage process includes an opportunity to choose a new name, and that’s the part they were after. It’s a cumbersome solution, though: Each time they go through the cycle, they have to deal with a flood of paperwork—updating bank records, passports, driver’s licenses, and more. The couple even asked the family court for a legal workaround, hoping to avoid the whole divorce part, but were denied. While the law seems archaic, Japan’s highest court tends to disagree: a challenge to the law, arguing that it discriminated against women, was denied in 2015.

While there are still ongoing efforts to reform the same-surname law, so far, they’ve been unsuccessful. So every few years, the above-discussed couple breaks their vows, at least on paper, and then get married all over again. (They probably don’t throw an extravagant party each time, and almost certainly don’t get lavish gifts, if any.)

Bonus fact: When some Japanese couples divorce (permanently, not like the couple in the main story today), there’s a gavel with a frog involved. As Reuters reported, some couples engage in “divorce ceremonies” where the soon-to-be-single pair, witnessed by their family and friends, “smashed their wedding ring with a gavel, a gesture signifying the end of their partnership.” The gavel often has an image of a frog on it, because the Japanese word for “frog”, 蛙 (pronounced “kaeru”) is a homophone for the verb “to return,” 帰る(also pronounced “kaeru,” as it’s a homophone). The frog, therefore, symbolizes a return to the single life for the divorcing couple.

From the Archives: The Land of the Adopted Son: The vast majority of adoptions in Japan are of adult men. Here’s why.