Routledge Contemporary Japan Series

<p>The Japanese <i>koseki</i> system is the legal and social structure keeping record of all Japanese citizens. Determined by the Civil Code and the Koseki Law, for activists challenging it, the <i>koseki</i> is also an ideological structure, which has produced patriarchal control through single-surname households.</p><p>Based on ethnographic fieldwork in Tokyo, this book engages with issues of gender hierarchy and structural inequality in Japanese society. Studying several decades of feminist activism and critique of the <i>koseki</i> system, it analyses the strategies of activists who have creatively circumvented <i>koseki</i> rules in order to maintain their natal names in marriage. It examines the case studies of members of the <i>fūfubessei</i> (separate surname movement) and the movement to end discrimination against children born out of wedlock, and in so doing this book illuminates the contradictions in current family law and <i>koseki</i> practice that have animated a generation of feminists in Japan.</p><p>Demonstrating the effect of the <i>koeski</i> on family, gender, and national identity, this book will be useful for students and scholars of Cultural Anthropology, Gender Studies, and Japanese Studies in general.</p>