Posthumous divorce: a woman's last declaration of independence in Japan

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Although formalizing a divorce requires the consent of both parties to the marriage, it can be done unilaterally after the death of one of the spouses. family relationship "with the family registration department and the corresponding municipal census.

To carry out the procedure, the interested party only has to present a document that identifies him/her, another document that certifies the death of the spouse, for example, the Family Registration Certificate and the declaration of termination of the family relationship. No consent or permission from anyone else is required. There is also no time limit for submitting documentation after becoming a widow or widower. right to refuse the application or receive notification of the application.

Although the procedure that allows "posthumous divorce" to be officially effective is as simple as that since its establishment, it has been in recent years that the number of people resorting to such a remedy has not existed, and the declaration of the end of the family relationship was so rare that not even family registry officials knew about it.

According to the statistics of the Ministry of Justice, the number of persons who formalized the procedure grew gradually, reaching 2,167 cases in 2013. However, after reaching 2,202 in 2014, the number shot up to 2,783 cases in 2015, an increase of almost 600 cases in one year. The figure rose to 4,032 in 2016, a dramatic increase of 150 percent. Thus, the number almost doubled in three years. It should also be noted that most of the people using this resource are women.

Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)
The generation gap in the daughter-in-law's role
One of the factors that have led to the rapid increase in posthumous divorces is the generation gap with respect to the vision of The Family System.

The model of the family system in Japan, a traditionally agricultural city, is based on the pre-war agricultural family. Rural families who owned property lived by cultivating land they had inherited for centuries. To prevent the land and heritage, the source of life support, from being divided and dispersed, the firstborn of the house inherited all the property. A hierarchy was created that placed the firstborn at the top of the family structure. The establishment of a family system based on patriarchy in the Meiji period led to the consolidation of the structure in which the first-born son headed the family generation after generation, inheriting land and property, and marrying a wife who became part of his family.

Although the family system of the Meiji era was abolished with the post-war reform of the Civil Code, its concept remained deeply rooted in the generation of Japanese people educated before the war and their children, the generation that is now over 75 years old. Most of them are well aware that when a woman marries, she becomes part of her husband's family, and they take it for granted that she should look after the family members and take care of them. They then create "expectations" that their children will treat them as they treated their parents, and expect daughters-in-law to play the same role as their generation.

On the other hand, while about 50% of the Japanese population worked in the former sector, mainly agriculture and fishing, until World War II, that percentage began to decline after 1955, until it fell below 10% in 1985. During the period of After the rapid economic growth that followed the war, young people from rural areas moved to the cities to work and study. It was during this generation, which began to live separately from their parents, that the nuclear family model became widespread, and the concepts of the home and the wife's membership in the husband's family ceased to be inherited and disappeared.

Now that women are increasingly participating in the labour market, many businesses, like men, continue to take care of the home and children.