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Japanese culture: Is it true adult adoption is common in Japan?

09.06.2025 00:25

Japanese culture: Is it true adult adoption is common in Japan?

There are two main current examples of this being done: firstly, because a family with a very large estate but no heirs wants to create a new person to manage the estate. The other is for gay people who want to marry in Japan, where same-sex marriage is currently not possible, to be legally recognised as a family. Neither is very common, considering the overall percentage of the population.

This custom died out after WW2, but the word 'adopted' remained in the language. It has actually been used as the title of a manga.

This derives from the way surnames are decided when getting married in Japan. In Japan, when people legally marry, they are required to unify their surnames to one of them: around 90% of people unify their surname as a couple using the male surname, while the rest adopt the female surname. This unification with the female surname when getting married is a kind of slang for 'adopted'.

Hello, I have a question about astral projection. I started to get interested in this a little while after my mum passed in april. I thought I may be able to see her and speak with her if I managed to achieve astral projection. Since this interest, every time i sleep on my back I go into sleep paralysis. However, I cant progress into astral projection because it is very scary for me as I feel like I'm suffocating when this happens. I panic and force myself to wake up. This only ever happened about once a year before this. It sometimes lasts a long time. This has happened about 3 times per week since my mum died, as mentioned on a previous post. I no longer try to go into it anymore(due to the suffocating feeling), but it still happens. I read that sleep paralysis is the pathway to astral projection. Why has this started to happen so frequently since simply taking an interest in it? Is this connected to the afterlife? I am concerned about it as I now cannot seem to stop this happening. Could it be my mum trying to communicate? Im asking due to more knowledge around this in this group.

This is due to the fact that Japanese civil law prior to WW2 did not allow one to choose to adopt a woman's surname when they married. If he really wanted to choose a woman's surname, he had to be adopted into a woman's family and married at the same time.

However, if you read the Japanese literature with automatic translation, you will find many more references to "adopted"(養子) than this.

True adoption is not that common.

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