The new “trend”, internationally…from the Front Page Sections, translated…
“Divorce after Death.” In recent years, I’d seen this phrase on the Japanese news media many times.
Divorce after death, is entirely different than divorce, what is divorced was the relational ties with the husband’s family. Based off of the Japanese civil laws, the relatives’ relationships would be terminated at the time of divorce. As a party dies, the party who’s still alive have the right to execute it. The divorce needed to be agreed upon by both parties, but the divorce after death, there’s only the need for the verification of the living individual being who s/he is and the household registration of the person who’d died, sending it in to the government unit, filing the forms of “Termination of Marital Relations”, then, it’s done.
The papers can be file, anytime AFTER the spouse passed away, the individual need not to get the okay from anybody else, the individual can choose to sever off the relational ties with the relatives of her/his spouse. And the families have no right to reject, nor would they receive a notice on this.
This wasn’t a new rule, but, almost nobody in Japan knows about it, in recent years, due to media discussions, it’d gained fame, there were 1,832 individual who’d filed for this, in 2015, the number increased to 2,783, and in 2016, to 4,032. Women took up the majority of the requests.
The divorce after death actually didn’t offer much concrete benefits, and even if the papers weren’t filed, legally, there’s no need for the one who’s still alive, to take care of the parents of the spouse, nor would the individual have the right to inherit the assets that belonged to the parents of the spouse, so, why did the applicants increase by number by the year?
Mostly, who’d gone to the attorney’s offices to file the parents were women in their sixties, and seventies. Reasons for filing the papers are mostly related to how the elderly women didn’t get along with the in-laws, didn’t want to take care of the family lot, or care for the relatives, hoped that they can be freed, of the obligations of marriage.
Although the Japanese laws already done away with the father’s being the patriarch of the households, but the eldest son inherits everything, taking care of the separate households, and as women married, they’d become, members of their husbands’ families, and the beliefs of these women, needing to give all they are able to to their husband’s families is, deeply rooted, and this duty became even more burdensome after the spouses died.
The various generations had a difference of opinions on the interactions of the mother-in-law and daughter-in-law, and it’d, impacted the marital relationships along with the family systems, but, it’s not at all easy, to end a marriage in Japan. In the older eras, the families views divorces as a failed life, most of the enterprises used their employees’ marital status as a marker of how good a worker they are, those who couldn’t keep their families, must have some shortcomings in their abilities. Up until now, as Japan enters into the final year of the current emperor’s time, the survey done by Yahoo! Japan at the start of April on the views of divorce, still showed that 68-percent of the online community being against it.
And so, the younger generations of Japanese became, even MORE hesitant toward entering into marriage, and, not many years from here, there would be the era of the populous unwed people in Japan; and the death after divorce seemed to be, the last declaration of independence for the last generation of Japanese women.
When more and more wanted to become independent from the systems of the family, how is “family” being defined, what is the system of “family” trying to uphold? Would Taiwan have a need, for the divorces after death too?
And so, this idea, is more symbolically, than it is, practically, because the person you’re married to is already dead, and, your ties with her/his family should’ve ended, at the moment of the individual’s death, right? But, in eastern cultures, there’s that rule of thumb of filial piety that we are forced to upkeep, and, that is why this became a debatable issue here. But this would be considered, the step toward independence for Japanese women, I suppose…
Life, the Obstacle Course 