Am I Finally Married?

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Am I Finally Married?
By: P.Ohata.
The UMJ Volume.3.3 Anniversary Special (Opinion)

After ten years of my husband receiving endless letters and pamphlets from dating agencies promising to find him the perfect bride, they suddenly stopped coming. Of course the reason is not that my name has suddenly appeared in the Jyuminhyo as his wife because as a foreign wife I do not exist in that register. And somebody, in fact many people, must have access to that private information in the first place for us to have had so much unsolicitated mail. No, the reason that my husband is no longer considered marriageable material is simply just because he's now passed the 40 year milestone and is probably thought of as having low marketable ability. So, the invisible wife got him in the end.

The second rather interesting development in my eleventh year of marriage was that I finally managed to officially take my husband's surname. I just thought that after marrying a Japanese citizen I would automatically take his surname, just as Japanese wives do. So what a shock it was after the birth of our first child to find father and child's names as Ohta and mother's name as my maiden name Davis in the family register. Then I found out that I wasn't officially Mrs. Ohta at all even though I had been using this name in my work and even when I bought property with my husband. After inquiring at the City Office as to how to actually become Mrs. Ohta I was told to bring in my passport and the necessary amendments could be made. So the next day I promptly went back to the City Office passport in hand. I was halfway through filling in the form when the official gasped in dismay and told me that I couldn't possibly use Ohta as a surname as I had chosen to keep Davis as a middle name (Patricia Davis Ohta) and Japanese law does not allow the use of a maiden name as a middle name. I then called the British Embassy about the possibility of changing my name again to Patricia Ohta in the passport. They told me that it was very difficult to change your name twice on the passport and I would need to come down to the Embassy in Tokyo, pay 9000 yen and sign a legal declaration in order to become Patricia Ohta. This all sounded too much to me, already heavily pregnant with our second child by this time. So I just let it go.

I shall remain Patricia Davis I thought. I know who I am anyway. But at the back of my mind it still bothered me, particularly as my name was listed as Patricia Ohta in our property ownership documentation. After we passed our tenth wedding anniversary I finally decided to do something about the situation again and was at the point of going down to the British Embassy. For some reason I was at the City Office around this time and just suddenly got the inspiration to try and change my name again without changing my passport name. Five years had passed and different people were at the desk for family register changes. "Yes, fine," they said. Just fill in this form. And nothing was said about the problem of using a maiden name as a middle name. And I walked out of there as Mrs. Ohta. I even got to use the kanji! I have heard of other foreign wives of Japanese being forced to use katakana for their Japanese surnames in the family register.

(The names have been altered to protect the author's privacy).