Japanese Companies Recognize Real Marriage by Giving Childcare Leave, Allowance Even Without Marriage Registration

Many of Japan’s major companies acknowledge that they live without registering marriage, and pay parental leave and family allowances equal to legal marriages to employees who are in fact married, according to a survey.

On the 8th, Mainichi Shimbun reported the results of a survey conducted on major Japanese conglomerates (64 responding companies) from January to February. As a result, more than half of the large companies surveyed (57.8%) treated common-law marriages and legal marriages equally in in-house regulations such as welfare benefits. In these companies, employees in common-law marriages are subject to marriage congratulations, parental leave, and family allowances, just like married people who have registered their marriages. These companies are known to check spouses in common-law relationships by certified copies of resident registration. Eighteen of the companies that recognize common-law marriages said they have changed the rules in the last five years. The reasons for revising the regulations were “diversification of values according to changes in family and marriage patterns” and “tend to increase demand for common-law marriages.” In response, Mainichi diagnosed, “Companies respond flexibly to various demands.”

On the other hand, companies that do not treat common-law marriages equally cited reasons such as “because the state does not recognize them as laws” and “because legal marriages are appropriate for confirming marital relationships.” However, some of these companies were considering revising regulations. The media said, “The number of corporate responses to treat common-law marriages as equal to legal marriages is increasing recently,” adding, “As competition to secure talent intensifies, we are trying to accept and choose various demands of young people.”

According to the Japanese Cabinet Office’s survey of 10,906 people in 2022, 3.3 percent of the respondents said they are married in six categories: legal marriage, de facto marriage, cohabitation, separation, bereavement, and unmarried. One of the reasons Japanese people choose to marry in common is that they do not want to change their last name after marriage. In Japan, couples are required to use the same surname. Therefore, when submitting a marriage registration, they will be asked to unify the last name, and more than 90 percent of the respondents will change their last name.

Meanwhile, the Nihon Keizai Shimbun surveyed 2,347 people on the selective marital gender system from the 4th to the 7th of last month, and 52 percent of married women who changed their last name because of marriage said they would not have changed their last name if they had been allowed to have a couple’s last name. The selective marital gender system is a system that allows couples to use different surnames, and is being actively discussed in politics, but conservatives of the Liberal Democratic Party oppose it.

In the survey, 28% of unmarried people responded that they would like to marry legally if they could choose their gender, more than three times more than 8% of men.

JENNIFER KIM

US ASIA JOURNAL