The ideal, the deficient, and the illogical family

The boundaries of the Japanese family are widening, but no matter how the citizens of Japan might organize themselves socially, they are also organized within administrative household units. The administrative household registration system, or koseki seido, configures administrative household units that often differ from the actual social family. It is not unusual for a state’s registration scheme for delineating administrative households to create units that differ from the registrants’ actual living arrangements and subjective sense of family. Still, the case of the Japanese system is intriguing because the Japanese registrants tend to attribute subjective meaning to the administrative “family” that is outlined on their family registry. The officially registered administrative household of which they are members and the group they consider to be their day-to-day family both exist as parallel, meaningful manifestations of family and each of these representations contribute significantly to the individual construction of legal and social identity. Penetrating into and controlling the life of every Japanese in a fundamental way (Sugimoto, 2010: 156), the koseki system creates a strong “koseki consciousness” that pre-consciously guides the registrants’ life choices and thereby how they structure their family, administratively as well as socially. ¹