Japan to allow divorced women to marry again

OK, our headline is a bit deceptive, but the gist is essentially true.

It’s been years in the offing and it might finally be happening: the law forbidding women from remarrying after a divorce is going to change.

Currently, a woman in Japan is legally unable to remarry straight after a divorce. She has to wait 100 days. Her ex-husband, though, is free to marry someone new without waiting.

The law was ostensibly introduced in the 19th century to the civil code to avoid disputes over a child’s father. The “cooling-off” period, which was six months until 2016, was put in place in case the woman was pregnant (knowingly or otherwise), and that child might legally have the wrong father if she married right after her divorce. The law includes “presumed legitimacy” that any child born within 300 days of a divorce is the child of the former husband. So if the woman is pregnant at the time of the divorce, she must wait 10 months before remarrying.

Of course, the law is assuming that a woman was having sex with a man she was about to divorce, which is unlikely — with the exception of the former husband forcing himself on his soon-to-be-former wife — and that she wasn’t having sex with the man she wanted to marry right after divorcing, which is also unlikely.

Even if a woman is willing to wait to remarry, she may be pregnant and know it’s the child of her new partner. In such cases, the couples sometimes do not legally register the birth of their new child, at least initially, to avoid it being registered as the offspring of the former husband.

With modern DNA testing, clarifying the paternity of a child is now accurate and convenient.

The current law’s logic, or lack thereof, has long been a sticking point for women in Japan. Even putting modern tech aside, there are various holes in the system. After all, a woman may have sex with someone else during her forced “singleton” period before marrying her next husband, or she may remarry but not be pregnant (or even want a child).

A new revision to the law is expected to pass during the current session of the Japanese parliament. It scraps the three-month remarriage waiting period and the “presumed legitimacy” of the ex-husband if the woman has remarried by the time she gives birth. However, he is still legally presumed to be the father if the woman has a child within 300 days of the divorce but has not married. This is still pretty silly, because it is based on the idea that a single woman cannot get pregnant, and that paternity is intrinsically tied to marriage.

With the divorce rate (and female adultery) increasing in Japan, the country’s sometimes archaic laws are slowly moving into the right century. That said, attitudes may often remain frustrating. The female president of Snow Peak, a prominent outdoor goods brand, recently resigned because she was pregnant with the child of her married lover. However, we are very confident that male company presidents are having lots of affairs with women, married or otherwise, and almost never resign if they get their lovers pregnant.