Revocation of the second marriage registration of Riharu

Rié’s second marriage was annulled when the Miyazaki Family Court approved petitions to correct her family register, establishing that the man who had married her as Daisuké Taniguchi was not the real Daisuké. The ruling removed the marriage from the official record and restored Rié’s maiden name, but the legal correction could not make her lived past feel settled: it left her questioning whose life she had been leading and how a person could be fully recorded as someone else.

Background: A marriage authenticated by the state

The case began with a contradiction. The man who presented himself as Daisuké had married Rié, fathered Hana with her, and died in a logging accident. Yet the real Daisuké existed, and his brother, Kyoichi Taniguchi, had identified the dead man as someone else. The impersonator’s identity had nevertheless passed through government procedures: officials updated the family register when the marriage and death were reported, and he used a driver’s license, health insurance, and pension records under Daisuké’s name. His account of growing up in Gunma appeared consistent with public records. The deception was not merely a false introduction; it had become administratively legible as a life.

This distinction mattered to Kido, who was investigating the case as Rié’s lawyer. Concealing a name was familiar to him as a third-generation Zainichi Korean who had become a naturalized Japanese citizen in high school. What he found difficult to understand was that someone had assumed the identity not of a fictional person but of a real man whose family could recognize that he was missing from the life represented in the records.

Petition and evidence

Because the family register placed Rié and the supposed Daisuké at her family home in Town S, Kido petitioned the Miyazaki Family Court, which had jurisdiction over the register. The requested corrections had two stages: first, cancel the record of Daisuké’s death, so that he would once again be listed as alive and the missing-person report would no longer describe someone officially recorded as dead; second, remove him from Rié’s register and restore her record under her maiden name, Takemoto. Annulment on the grounds of error would erase the second marriage from her register, with the further consequence that Hana, the child Rié had with X, would be legally illegitimate.

The court required more than Kido’s account. Given the unusual circumstances, it asked Rié to appear in person and requested a DNA test to establish that X was not Daisuké Taniguchi. Kido gathered biological samples from X’s belongings, including hair from his clothes, nail clippings, an electric razor, and a toothbrush, and returned with them to Yokohama. The test supplied the definitive evidence needed to distinguish the man who had lived with Rié from the person whose name he had used.

The ruling and its consequences

Kido had warned that a decision might take anywhere from two months to a year; if the petitions failed, the next step would have been 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 result confirmed that X was not Daisuké. The second marriage was erased from the records, and Rié was no longer legally a widow: in the corrected register, she had been married only once.

The change also exposed the extent of Rié’s earlier, unwitting participation in the false record. She had believed she married a man named Daisuké Taniguchi, announced that belief to people around her, and notified the government of his death without knowing what the real Daisuké was doing or where he was. The register’s correction did not simply fix a clerical mistake; it marked her own actions as founded on an identity that had never been true. Rié felt a bewildering sadness and lost any definite sense of whose life she herself was living.

The past beyond the register

The legal case turns on a system that can make a person officially present—or absent—through records. Kido later considered this problem in connection with Japan’s three-hundred-day rule: a child born within three hundred days of a divorce is legally treated as the former husband’s child, and some children born to new partners are left without a family register when their births are not reported. In such cases, the state may fail to acknowledge either their lives or their deaths. The possibility sharpened Kido’s concern that X might have been unregistered and that the real Daisuké’s disappearance could therefore be impossible to trace through official records.

The register had accumulated different functions over centuries, from policing and taxation to recording births, marriages, adoptions, addresses, occupations, and deaths. Although modern administration increasingly relied on residence certificates and other linked systems, Kido and his colleague Nakakita recognized that administrative records could still be exchanged, falsified, or fail to include people. Rié’s annulment resolves which name belongs on her family record; it does not restore the certainty that records appear to promise. Her marriage was legally removed, but the years she lived within it remained part of her history.