Fufubessei Movement in Japan: Thinking About Women’s Resistance and Subjectivity

The family law reform movement is not one single organized movement. Two pillars of this reform movement are “marital family naming” and “discrimination against children born out of wedlock.” In many cases in contemporary Japan, these two problems are interlocked. Here . . ., however, I will mainly focus on the Japanese women’s movement to keep their family name in marriage, that is, to refuse to change their names to their husband’s. This movement called “fufubessei” —literally meaning “husband’s and wife’s different surnames”—has gained significant currency among the Japanese public since the 1980s.