At the very least, the three men and three women calming their nerves on a Friday evening at a venue in Tokyo know they have one thing in common.

Spaced out across booths, they will soon be placed in pairs and given 15 minutes to get to know one another.

“Let’s start with a nice ‘hello’ and a big smile,” the emcee says.

When they meet they will only need to use their first names – because they all share the same surname.

The event is the first in a series that – novelty value aside – aims to skirt Japan’s controversial ban on married couples having separate surnames by getting people with the same surname together.

After the participants have confirmed their IDs on an app, the chatter begins and the beer begins to flow. Round one over, the men are asked to move to the next table. Laughter is heard from one of the tables – surely a good sign. At another, the couple get to their feet and help themselves to cakes and biscuits provided by sponsor companies that share their common surname: Suzuki.

Similar events have been planned for other people with the same surnames: Ito, Tanaka and Sato, Japan’s most popular family name.

“To be honest, I’m not too fussed about keeping my maiden name, but I thought it would be fun to meet another Suzuki,” says *Hana Suzuki, a 34-year-old nurse.

What’s in a name?

Japan’s civil code specifies that a husband and wife must have the same family name. Couples are free to choose which surname to take when they marry, but in just under 95% of cases, it is the woman who has to adapt – a reflection, critics, say of Japan’s male-dominated society.

In practice, many women continue to use their birth name at work and their legal, married surname in official documents. Although the government allows birth names to appear alongside married ones on passports, driving licences and other documents, Japan remains the only country in the world that requires spouses to use the same name.

The UN committee on the elimination of discrimination against women has also called on Japan’s government to revise the laws and introduce a selective dual-surname system.

Businesses are among those urging change, saying the rule is proving an obstacle to Japanese firms that do business overseas if female employees use work ID that doesn’t match their surname.

The powerful business lobby Keidanren has collected testimony from women who say the rule has negatively affected their careers, including academics whose work written under their birth name struggles to gain recognition, and managerial-level women whose “business name” has been rejected when signing contracts.

According to an internal Keidanren survey, 82% of female executives said they supported allowing married couples to use separate surnames.

“We launched the project to highlight a growing issue in Japan, as many people hesitate to marry because of the requirement to change their surname,” said Yuka Maruyama, a creative planner and project initiator at Asuniwa.

“We wanted to present a simple and slightly humorous idea – matching people who already share the same surname – in order to make this issue more visible and easier to understand,” he said.

Successive Liberal Democratic governments have refused to consider changing the law. Conservative members have led the resistance, arguing that amending the civil code, which was adopted in the late 1800s, would “undermine” the traditional family unit and cause confusion among children.

‘A safe option’

“Keeping my maiden name isn’t a deal breaker, but I can see why taking my husband’s name could be inconvenient in, say, the workplace,” says Hana, one of the participants in the matchmaking event. “I’m fine with the idea of separate surnames, but I think it could cause problems when you have children … which name would they take?”

A recent survey of 2,500 people in their 20s and 30s who use the Japanese dating app Pairs found that 36.6% of women and 46.6% of men felt reluctant about changing their surname, while a smaller proportion of both sexes had misgiving about their partner changing their name. Just over 7% said they would break up if neither partner wanted to change their surname.

Japan’s prime minister, Sanae Takaichi, has shown little interest in changing the law. Instead, she supports a bill that would expand legal recognition of birth names in official documents – a compromise critics say would do little to end the confusion for women who have to use one of two names depending on the circumstances.

Takaichi took her husband’s surname, Yamamoto, during their first marriage, which ended in 2017. When they remarried in 2021, he officially took the name Takaichi.

The conservative leader told MPs this month she opposed the introduction of selective separate surnames, preferring, as she had done, to use birth names in certain situations. It was important, she said, for “spouses and their children to share the same surname on the family register”.

The matchmaking party’s organisers do not follow up with couples for privacy reasons, but some of this evening’s participants appear to have few regrets.

“I’ve been to matchmaking parties before, but I thought this one would be more interesting,” says *Taisho Suzuki, a 33-year-old company employee. “I hadn’t given much thought to the idea of marrying another Suzuki, but I can see now why it’s a safe option. I don’t want to give up my surname when I marry, and I know a lot of women feel the same about their names.”

He and his female counterpart have used their shared family name as an icebreaker, laughing as they recounted the times their name was called in government offices and waiting rooms – prompting responses from multiple people – before numbered tickets became the norm.

“Now that I’m in my 30s my priorities have changed and I want to marry and have children,” he says. “If I met a woman with an unusual surname, I’d understand why she would want to keep it. I guess we’d have to sit down and work something out.”

* First names have been changed at the interviewees’ request