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Married couples in Japan must have the same surname, so does Mr. Sato regret taking his wife’s?

Casey Baseel Sep 20, 2025
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10 years after legally giving up his Sato-hood, would he make the same choice again?

There was a time when the vast majority of people in Japan didn’t have family names. During the feudal era, surnames were for the exclusive use of the nobility and warrior classes, so if you weren’t a local lord or samurai, you had only your given name to go by. It wasn’t until the late 19th century, when the Meiji restoration brought about a rapid modernizing of Japanese governmental systems, that regular Joes and Janes (or Taros and Hanakos) were finally permitted to have family names too, with the passing of the Order Permitting Commoner Surnames in 1870 on September 19, which has now joined the ranks of Japan’s quasi-holidays as Myoji no Hi, or “Surname/Family Name Day.”

However, while everyone in Japan has been allowed to have a surname for 155 years now, there are still some restrictions in place. For example, if Hanako and Taro get married, and she wants to continue using her maiden names in a legal capacity (i.e. on their driver’s license, credit cards, contract paperwork, etc.) while he continues using his own, the Japanese government says that’s not OK. That might sound incredibly sexist, but the rule isn’t that women have to take their family’s name, it’s that Japanese-citizen married couples have to have the same family name.

In practice, the majority of women in Japan do end up taking their husband’s surname when they marry, but the opposite scenario isn’t shockingly unusual. There’s even a phrase for it: “Muko ni naru” literally translate to “Become a son-in-law,” but is used to describe the situation in which a man who’s getting married takes his wife’s surname instead.

Longtime readers might recall that we talked about this a while back in regard to SoraNews24 crack reporter Mr. Sato…who technically isn’t Mr. Sato at all, or at least not anymore. Since exchanging vows with his lady love, he’s now legally Mr. Yamashina.

▼ The driver’s license of Hidenori Yamashina (山科英典)

The most common impetus for a man taking his wife’s family name is her not having any brothers. With no sons in the family, the surname would die out if the daughters all took their husbands’ surnames, and so having the groom muko ni naru can extend the family’s name until at least the next generation, should the couple have children.

For Mr. Sato, the decision to take his wife’s name wasn’t one he agonized over. “Sato” is already the most common surname in Japan, and since he himself has a brother, it’s not like he’d be bringing an end to his family’s Sato heritage either. It’s now been 10 years since he legally became Mr. Yamashina, though, so looking back, does he regret that choice?

Let’s start with the biggest negative: Changing his surname was a massive hassle. Driver’s license, bank accounts, credit cards, insurance registries, apartment leases, passports – all of those, and more, require separate processing when you change your name. Some steps require you to come into a government office or customer service counter in-person, and others insist that you do them online. It was a huge drain of time and energy, on a scale that he never wants to go through again.

However, those are all inconveniences that, if he hadn’t gone through them in the process of becoming Mr. Yamashina, his wife would have had to in order to become Mrs. Sato, so collectively for the couple, it’s not really any worse an option than her taking his family name. It’s also worth taking into account that Mr. Sato and his wife didn’t start their courtship as high school sweethearts. By the time they met, they both already had the sizable collections of name-bearing records and documents that accumulate as one progresses into mature adulthood, so Mr. Sato probably had more to do than a younger man taking on his wife’s family name might.

▼ By the way, in order to avoid confusion with long-term associates it’s not so unusual for Japanese people who take their spouse’s surname to continue using their own for work-related conversations and correspondence, since first names are rarely used in formal business settings, so in the office and when he’s out on assignments, he’s still “Mr. Sato.”

OK, so what about the positives? Mr. Sato says:

“The best thing about taking my wife’s family name is the feeling of joy I got from it symbolizing that we were going to spend out lives from now on together. It gave me a sense of determination, or I guess maybe you could call it resolve, a feeling of strength that we were going to share our lives with each other.”

Ultimately, within the current framework of what’s allowed under Japanese law, Mr. Sato feels the choice of whether the couple should use the wife’s surname is something for each individual couple to decide for themselves, based on their relationship and situation. For him, though? “I’ve never thought ‘I should have stayed Sato,’ since the joy it’s brought me is far greater than any of the drawbacks.”

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