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FEATURE: Nonregistered marriages on the increase+
[April 02, 2006]

FEATURE: Nonregistered marriages on the increase+


(Japan Economic Newswire Via Thomson Dialog NewsEdge)TOYONAKA, Japan, April 3_(Kyodo) _ Hiroyuki Ito, 41, a company employee living in Toyonaka, Osaka Prefecture, is not registered as the head of the household where he lives with his wife, Ayuri Yuasa, 35, a local government employee.



Yuasa is the family head, as she was living in the house before their marriage on Jan. 1, 2000, and they did not have their marriage registered at the municipal government office. In their residence certificate, it says, "Husband (unregistered.)"

Instead of registering their marriage, they submitted notification of separation from their respective parents' family registers to make their own.


This is the way that many couples are choosing so that they can both keep their separate surnames, as a bill to enable couples to keep their original names is still pending in parliament. Such a union is called "de facto marriage" in Japanese.

Both Ito and Yuasa now favor having separate family names, but they did not see eye to eye on the issue before they got married.

Yuasa tried to persuade Ito to accept the separate family name idea by not registering the marriage, citing as an argument, "People in Mitsui Bank would get angry if told their bank will become Sumitomo Bank tomorrow due to a merger."

At that time, Ito had the conventional way of thinking about marriage and told Yuasa, "I think it common for a woman to take the family name of her husband when they marry."

However, after several talks with her, he began to think that he would also hate the practice should he be a woman, and so he accepted what she proposed.

Yuasa's motto is a "cheerful de-facto marriage," and she told those around her, "Ours is a de-facto marriage." An acquaintance of her parents congratulated her, saying, "I do not know whether that is called a marriage. Anyway, Congratulations!"

"Couples taking separate family names used to feel heroism of a 'do-or-die' nature by preparing themselves for entering an underground and theorizing their idea, but I feel that recent couples are airy fairy and taking things easy," said Noriko Higuchi, 46, representative of a "society for thinking about separate surnames" inaugurated in 1991.

"Even today, cohabitation and a de-facto marriage are mistaken, and quite a few people are uncomfortable with separate surnames. But with changes in the form of marriages, understanding of de-facto marriages is certainly spreading," she said.

A 22-year-old female graduate from a Tokyo private university this spring, who wants not to be identified, said she spends more time at her boyfriend's apartment than at her home in Tokyo. "Oh well. Cohabitation used to be a secret kept from parents? I have never concealed my half-cohabitation with him from my parents."

Her boyfriend, who hails from a country area and graduated from another private university this spring, began to work at a manufacturing company in April. Takeuchi, who failed to find a job, will go to the United States to study English to help her find a job.

She feels uneasy about future relations with the boyfriend, but what is important for her now is to secure a job for a living.

"When I was a senior high school student, my parents divorced. That may have influenced me, but still I wonder how many women there are who think marriage is the only way to their happiness," she said.

A 59-year-old housewife living in the city of Tottori, who asked to be unidentified, said, "Cohabitation before was merely a secret resistance to parents, and I as well as almost all my friends got married in the conventional way."

"So, when I learned that my son has been cohabitating with his girlfriend, I felt I was going to be ripped apart between the feeling that I wanted to understand him and my old sense of values," she said.

"As young people are free, they have to choose their way of living by themselves. We resisted our parents' strong sense of value, but I think they have to be much tougher than us," she said.

Chikako Ogura, 54, a psychologist, said young couples live together before marriage as a trial because they think it risky to get married and live together all of a sudden. "They get married if they think they can manage to live together. If they do not think that way, they may part."

"But you should not miss the deep alienation they harbor. Young people who cannot have hopes for their future are liable to think it good to live enjoyably with agreeable companions," she said.

Ogura said the baby boomers who grew up during the age of high economic growth spent their energy for social reforms because they thought there was a future for them, and they also had a dream about marriage.

"Young people today are enduring the pressure of reality, and it is quite natural for them to regard marriage as severe."

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