Paper short abstract

This paper analyzes Diet debates and party proposals on Japan’s surname system in the 2020s, focusing on the selective separate surname system. Applying the WPR approach, it traces competing problem representations and examines whether and how they invoke and constitute women’s rights and interests.

Paper long abstract

Debates over allowing married couples to retain separate surnames (fūfu bessei) remain a recurrent issue in Japanese politics. This study analyzes how the “problem” of Japan’s current surname system, which requires married couples to share a single surname, is represented in Diet deliberations and in party policy proposals and discussions, with a primary focus on the 2020s. It pays particular attention to whether and how women and women’s rights and interests are invoked—or not—within these texts. At the same time, the study examines how “women’s rights and interests” are constituted within competing representations of the policy problem. Rejecting the assumption of fixed or homogeneous “women’s interests,” it treats interests and rights-claims as objects of political contestation. What comes to count as “women’s interests,” and which rights are framed as requiring protection or advancement, can vary across actors and may reflect competing priorities.

Building on Carol Bacchi’s “What’s the Problem Represented to be?” (WPR) approach, I analyze selected Diet debates and party proposals related to surname policy from the 2020s. The analysis asks: (1) What is the “problem” represented to be in these policy texts? (2) What presuppositions or assumptions underlie these representations? (3) What is left unproblematic or taken for granted? and (4) What effects are produced by these problem representations? In addressing these questions, the study specifically interrogates whether and how women’s interests and rights are invoked and constituted within each analytical stage—from the initial framing of the “problem” to the underlying assumptions, the silences, and their effects.

By unpacking these representations, the paper aims to clarify the gendered dynamics of contemporary policy debate over surname policy in Japan and to contribute to political science research on how gender equality is articulated, constrained, or marginalized within policy debates. The analysis may also shed light on why the introduction of a selective dual-surname system has remained stalled since the early 1990s, despite international pressure and shifting domestic public opinion