Legal procedure for annulling a marriage on grounds of error

The legal procedure for annulling a marriage on grounds of error is the means by which Rié’s second marriage is removed from her family register after DNA testing proves that her husband, X, was not Daisuké Taniguchi. The correction restores Rié’s maiden name and alters the official account of her family, but it cannot simply undo the life she shared with X: the legal record now says she was married only once, while Hana becomes legally illegitimate and Rié is left questioning whose life she has been living.

The identity problem behind the petition

The process begins with a mismatch between the identity recorded in the family register and the identity of the man who died. X had lived as “Daisuké Taniguchi,” and his death had been reported under that name. After his death, however, Rié learned that her husband had not been the real Daisuké. She had married someone she had never met, believing him to be a man whose whereabouts and circumstances she did not know. The problem was therefore not just that a name had been entered incorrectly: the marriage, the report of death, and Rié’s own married identity all rested on a false identification.

At first, the police response offered little help. When Rié and Kyoichi explained the circumstances, a detective asked, “Huh? Then the one that died was who?” He took no investigative action beyond having Kyoichi file a missing-person report for Daisuké, and he did not answer Rié’s question about how she could discover her husband’s identity. Two weeks later, the police said there was no one matching Daisuké Taniguchi on the missing-person list and told her there was “no way to investigate at the present time.” The dead man’s identity was not resolved by the ordinary route of police inquiry; Rié instead turned to Kido for legal help.

Correcting the family register

Kido’s first proposal was to establish the connection between Rié’s register and the Taniguchi family register. If X was not Daisuké, Kido reasoned, Rié had no reason to keep using the Taniguchi name. Rié agreed, although the name remained emotionally bound to her late husband. She had also begun to feel guilty about presenting herself as a Taniguchi after meeting Kyoichi, because it seemed to her like claiming the name of a stranger.

The relevant family register listed Rié and “Daisuké Taniguchi” at Rié’s family home in Town S, giving the Miyazaki Family Court jurisdiction over the matter. Kido petitioned for two connected revisions. First, he asked the court to cancel the removal of “Daisuké Taniguchi” from the register due to death. That would make the official record show Daisuké as alive, so the police would no longer be asked to search for someone the records classified as dead. Second, he asked that “Daisuké Taniguchi” be removed from Rié’s register and that she be restored to her maiden name, Takemoto. In legal terms, the marriage was to be annulled on the basis of error, erasing Rié’s second marriage from her family register.

The requested revisions were not a simple clerical correction. Because the case was unusually complicated, the court required Rié to appear in person and requested DNA evidence that X was not Daisuké Taniguchi. Kido gathered material from X’s personal effects, including hair from his clothes, nail clippings, an electric razor, and a toothbrush, and took the samples back to Yokohama. The physical traces were needed to establish, through testing, the distinction the official records had obscured: the man who had lived and died as Daisuké was not the person named in the Taniguchi register.

Ruling and consequences

Kido had warned that the court’s ruling might take from two months to a year. If the petition were rejected, the next step would be a lawsuit seeking a declaratory judgment that the marriage was invalid. Instead, both petitions were approved five months later, around the first week of August. The DNA test definitively established that X was not Daisuké Taniguchi, and Rié’s second marriage disappeared from the records. Her family register now showed her as a woman who had been married once, rather than a widow of the man whose name X had assumed.

That correction also changed Hana’s legal status. Because the marriage was erased, Hana, Rié’s child with X, became illegitimate in the eyes of the law. The procedure thus repaired one false official identity while imposing a new consequence on the family record. Its effects reached beyond Rié’s surname: the state’s recognition of the marriage determined how it classified her child as well.

Law, memory, and the limits of correction

Rié does not experience the outcome as a purely bureaucratic victory. She recognizes that the error was also hers: she had believed she married a man named Daisuké Taniguchi, publicly told others that this was her husband, and notified the government of his death without knowing who the real Daisuké was or where he might be. The court can correct the record, but it cannot make those lived years unreal. Once the past is officially rewritten, Rié feels a harrowing sadness and loses a concrete sense of whose life she has been leading.

The procedure therefore holds two kinds of truth beside each other. Legally, it restores Rié’s maiden name and removes a marriage founded on mistaken identity. Personally, the life she shared with X remains part of her past, even though the register no longer recognizes that marriage. The petition supplies a remedy for the documentary consequences of deception, yet the changed record cannot settle the intimate question of what the relationship meant or erase the family formed within it.