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10 years after legally giving up his Sato-hood, would he make the same choice again?<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n <\/span><\/p>\n There was a time when the vast majority of people in Japan didn\u2019t have family names. During the feudal era, surnames were for the exclusive use of the nobility and warrior classes, so if you weren\u2019t a local lord or samurai, you had only your given name to go by.\u00a0It wasn\u2019t 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<\/strong> in 1870 on September 19, which has now joined the ranks of Japan\u2019s quasi-holidays as Myoji no Hi, or \u201cSurname\/Family Name Day.\u201d<\/p>\n 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\u2019s license, credit cards, contract paperwork, etc.) while he continues using his own, the Japanese government says that\u2019s not OK<\/strong>. That might sound incredibly sexist, but the rule isn\u2019t that women have to take their family\u2019s name, it\u2019s that married couples have to have the same family name<\/strong>.<\/p>\n In practice, the majority of women in Japan do end up taking their husband\u2019s surname when they marry, but the opposite scenario isn\u2019t shockingly unusual. There\u2019s even a phrase for it: \u201cMuko ni naru\u201d<\/strong> literally translate to \u201cBecome a son-in-law,\u201d but is used to describe the situation in which a man who\u2019s getting married takes his wife\u2019s surname instead.<\/p>\n Longtime readers might recall that we talked about this a while back<\/a> in regard to SoraNews24 crack reporter Mr. Sato<\/strong>\u2026who technically isn\u2019t Mr. Sato at all, or at least not anymore. Since exchanging vows with his lady love, he\u2019s now legally Mr. Yamashina<\/strong>.<\/p>\n \u25bc The driver\u2019s license of Hidenori Yamashina (\u5c71\u79d1\u82f1\u5178)<\/p>\n The most common impetus for a man taking his wife\u2019s 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\u2019 surnames, and so having the groom muko ni naru<\/em> can extend the family\u2019s name until at least the next generation<\/strong>, should the couple have children.<\/p>\n For Mr. Sato, the decision to take his wife\u2019s name wasn\u2019t one he agonized over. \u201cSato\u201d is already the most common surname in Japan<\/a>, and since he himself has a brother<\/a>, it\u2019s not like he\u2019d be bringing an end to his family\u2019s Sato heritage either. It\u2019s now been 10 years since he legally became Mr. Yamashina, though, so looking back, does he regret that choice?<\/strong><\/p>\n Let\u2019s start with the biggest negative: Changing his surname was a massive hassle<\/strong>. Driver\u2019s license, bank accounts, credit cards, insurance registries, apartment leases, passports \u2013 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.<\/p>\n However, those are all inconveniences that, if he hadn\u2019t 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\u2019s not really any worse an option than her taking his family name. It\u2019s also worth taking into account that Mr. Sato and his wife didn\u2019t 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\u2019s family name might.<\/p>\n \u25bc By the way, in order to avoid confusion with long-term associates it\u2019s not so unusual for Japanese people who take their spouse\u2019s 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\u2019s out on assignments, he\u2019s still \u201cMr. Sato.\u201d<\/p>\n OK, so what about the positives? Mr. Sato says:<\/strong><\/p>\n \u201cThe best thing about taking my wife\u2019s 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.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n Ultimately, within the current framework of what\u2019s allowed under Japanese law, Mr. Sato feels the choice of whether the couple should use the wife\u2019s surname is something for each individual couple to decide for themselves, based on their relationship and situation. For him, though? \u201cI\u2019ve never thought \u2018I should have stayed Sato,\u2019 since the joy it\u2019s brought me is far greater than any of the drawbacks.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n Photos \u00a9SoraNews24<\/em> 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\u2019t have family…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2179","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-rss"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/catbradley.io\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2179","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/catbradley.io\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/catbradley.io\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/catbradley.io\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/catbradley.io\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2179"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/catbradley.io\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2179\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/catbradley.io\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2179"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/catbradley.io\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2179"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/catbradley.io\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2179"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/soranews24.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/3\/2025\/09\/sm-2.jpg?w=640\")
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\n\u25cf Want to hear about SoraNews24\u2019s latest articles as soon as they\u2019re published? Follow us on Facebook<\/a> and Twitter<\/a>!<\/em><\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"