After years of debate and shifting social trends, legislation that would allow Japanese married couples to keep separate surnames may finally hit the Diet floor.
Buttressed by findings of a Cabinet Office survey released in August as well as recommendations made by a government panel last month, the Justice Ministry is now preparing draft legislation to revise the Civil Code.
A nationwide random survey on 5,000 adults found that 42.1 percent of respondents expressed support for revising the law to enable couples to keep premarital names, outnumbering those who oppose it for the first time in any government poll.