"Immoral" women, invisible children. An anthropological analysis of the phenomenon of unregistered children in Japan in a gendered perspective.

It is estimated that every year in Japan 3.000 children go unregistered. When they are born, they are not recorded in their families’ koseki, household register, the main registration system for Japanese citizens. It is known as the mukoseki problem. Without documents, access to public services such as education, health care, and welfare is extremely complicated, if not impossible. As adults they will also struggle to work, open a bank account, rent housing, vote, get married, register their children, get a passport or a driver’s license. In 70 percent of cases the reason why mothers do not register children is art. 772 of the Civil code, according to which children born within 300 days after divorce are children of the ex-husband. When this is not the case, mothers must prove so in court. This phenomenon has been largely ignored by scholarship on Japan, and this research fills this gap in the literature with a novel approach. It is an anthropological analysis of the mukoseki problem based on ethnographic data, such as participant-observation and semi-structured in-depths interviews with mothers of mukoseki children, former mukoseki, activists, and lawyers. It also uses a multidisciplinary approach, drawing on history, media studies, and law. This thesis traces the history of the mukoseki problem along with the history of the koseki register, and the transformations of socio-cultural notions of family in Japan, with a focus on the second post-war period. It illustrates the present legislative and administrative context for the mukoseki problem and the obstacles that mothers of mukoseki children face in their struggle to register them. I argue firstly that art. 772 is biased and that it has not been amended since 1898 because of the concerns of conservative politicians that allowing married women to register a child as the son or daughter of a man who is not their husband will sanction infidelity and disrupt families; secondly, that behind the conservatives’ objection is the desire to control women’s fertility and the moral assumption that the 300 days problem is the just punishment for women who deviate from social expectations regarding marriage; and lastly that government measures taken to solve the mukoseki problem so far, including the reform to the Civil Code, are ineffective because they do not eliminate this bias.