Strange story: Couples get divorced every 3 years-Young friend

After 3 years of marriage, the 32-year-old couple decided to divorce. Not long after, they applied for marriage registration again for special reasons.

Every 3 years, an unnamed couple in Hachioji divorce to re-register their marriage using each other’s surnames. Photo: Kayo Mukuda/Mainichi.

A couple (both 32 years old) from Hachioji city, a suburb of Tokyo (Japan) could not agree on whose surname they would take after marriage. Neither of them wanted to give up their original last name. In the end, they decided to respect each other’s wishes to alternate them.

According to Mainichi, the husband is a civil servant, and the wife is an office worker in Tokyo. They have known each other since college and plan to get married after a few months of dating.

Japanese law stipulates that couples must agree to use only one last name when getting married. However, the wife did not want to change to her husband’s traditional surname. “My husband (who was still a boyfriend at the time) thought women should have their husband’s last name. I didn’t think so, so we argued,” she said.

After graduation, the two started working and their conversations about marriage issues became more and more real. One day, in a conversation with a colleague, the husband learned a family Others have used each other’s last names by divorce and remarriage. He told his wife (then his girlfriend) and both decided to do the same.

In 2016, the couple held a wedding ceremony and used the husband’s last name for the first 3 years of their marriage. Sharing with Mainichi, the wife said she wanted to use her original name at work. But due to security issues, such as possible identity theft, the use of 2 surnames is not allowed, so she was asked to use her legal last name under her husband’s last name. She gets depressed every time someone calls her by this last name.

In 2019, the couple filed for divorce for the first time and then registered their marriage using the wife’s last name. By July this year, they will divorce and remarry again to use the husband’s last name.

“Besides this, we only know how to legally get married abroad so that we can keep our original surname. We both want that,” the two shared.

Director Kazuhiro Soda and his wife are the first to have their marital status recognized when using their own surname.

There was a similar case before that was the marriage of director Kazuhiro Soda and his wife Kiyoko Kashiwagi. They were married in the United States, under New York law in 1997, using their own surnames.

In 2018, they applied for a marriage registration under their own surname to the Chiyoda ward office (Tokyo, Japan) but was rejected. In April 2021, the Tokyo District Court issued a ruling recognizing the marital status of Soda and Kashiwagi in Japan.

“This is the first time that a marriage between two people, performed in a foreign country and with the same family name, has been recognized in Japan. It is difficult to understand that a legal marriage abroad is the only way for a person to get married. Couples don’t need to share the same last name,” said the lawyer in Soda and Kashiwagi’s lawsuit.