Japanese women took to the streets of Tokyo on Wednesday to celebrate International Women’s Day with calls to end the rule forcing couples to choose a last name when getting married.
Protesters gathered to call on Prime Minister Fumio Kishida’s ruling party to change the rule, arguing that in most cases women are giving up their last names due to public pressure in a country that ranks among the world’s worst in terms of gender equality.
MPs attending the protest were handed a statement from several human rights groups calling for changes to the 125-year-old civil code.
According to experts, Japan is the only country in the world that imposes an obligation to choose only one spouse’s surname.
“We call on Parliament to consider this issue and move quickly to revise the Civil Code,” the activists said in a statement.
Japan ranked 116th out of 146 countries for gender equality in the World Economic Forum’s global report last year, and efforts to promote women in management and government have stalled. Of the 20 members of Mr. Kishida’s cabinet, only two are women ministers.
“The situation of women trying to balance housework and work responsibilities in our country is quite difficult, and this has been identified as a problem,” Cabinet Minister Hirokazu Matsuno said on Wednesday.
Although the 1898 Code does not specify who must give up their surname, 95 percent of the time it is women who are still detained in the country because of paternalistic family values.
Public support for the dual surname option has increased, with polls showing that a majority now supports the option for married couples to keep separate surnames.
Some couples have also filed lawsuits alleging that the current law violates the constitutional guarantee of gender equality, as women almost always give their last names.
A study published in the Sankei Shimbun daily found that the majority (65 percent) of women in Japan pay little attention to self-care for family responsibilities, compared to 42 percent of men.
Women did 80 percent of cooking compared to 8 percent of men, and other household chores carried the same weight. The only job that men did more than women was garbage collection (49 to 43 percent).
Additional agency reporting
Source: I News
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