Meiji period

The Meiji period is a turning point in the history of Japan’s family register: as freedom of movement weakened the system’s old attachment to land, a modern register emerged, but administrative records continued to shape who could be officially recognized. The novel places this transition within a much longer account of registration, showing how an instrument of governance can preserve identities, enable their alteration, and leave people effectively unrecorded.

From Land-Based Records to a Modern Register

The family-register system had been premised on people’s attachment to particular places. When freedom of movement was recognized in the late nineteenth century, not long after the beginning of the Meiji period, that premise became obsolete. A modern family register was introduced in its place, adapting official records to a society in which people were no longer understood as fixed to one locality.

The new register served the census and the state’s needs for conscription and tax collection. Those purposes gave people reasons to avoid registration or falsify their records. The period’s change was therefore not simply an administrative modernization: the register could connect an individual to public obligations, making evasion and misrepresentation consequential strategies.

A Longer History of Registration and Exclusion

The discussion of the Meiji transition sits within a broader history related by Kido’s colleague Nakakita. The register’s origins reach back to the Ritsuryo system, an imperial bureaucracy modeled on China that began in the late sixth century. Initially used mainly for policing and tax collection, the system expanded in the Edo period to include religious affiliation, as authorities used temple records to monitor Christianity. Over time, records also accumulated information such as birth, marriage, adoption, address, occupation, and death.

Yet the register never accounted for everyone. Its dependence on attachment to land left many people, including vagrants, outside its coverage. Later, even a more modern system remained vulnerable to gaps and falsification. Nakakita describes children who lacked registers because births outside marriage went unreported, as well as children born overseas during wartime when a closed diplomatic mission prevented a birth notification from being submitted. These absences show that a record system can be extensive without being complete.

Records, Identity, and State Recognition

The novel connects the register’s historical development to the present-day consequences of being unregistered. Under the Civil Code’s three-hundred-day rule, a child born within three hundred days of a divorce was legally considered the former husband’s child. Some women who had divorced after domestic violence and then had a child with a new partner refrained from filing a birth notification rather than have the former husband recorded as the father. Their children could consequently enter society without family registers.

The consequences extend beyond administrative inconvenience. Although such children might meet the conditions for Japanese citizenship, the state could remain unaware that they were alive; if they were lost in a tsunami, their deaths could not be counted either. In official records, neither their arrival in the world nor their departure from it had taken place. This account makes the register a measure of public recognition, not merely a repository of personal history.

That distinction also sharpens Kido’s investigation into the man who had lived under Daisuké Taniguchi’s identity. The deceased had been recognized across official records—as a spouse, driver, patient, and contributor to the pension system—despite not being the real Daisuké. Kido’s later speculation that the real Daisuké might have exchanged registers with an unregistered person exposes the instability beneath those confirmations: complete documentation can validate an assumed identity while leaving the person displaced by it difficult to find.

The Register’s Changing Role

Nakakita observes that the government now conducts much identity management through residence certificates. He expects the family register to become redundant once taxes and social security are connected through the My Number system. Kido answers that this integration may make identities easier to trade; Nakakita adds that linking the system to biometrics would make it nearly inescapable.

The movement from land-based registers to modern records thus does not resolve the book’s central tension. Each administrative form promises improved identification, yet each also creates new ways for people to be omitted, misclassified, or made traceable. The Meiji-period shift is significant because it marks one stage in that continuing transformation: freedom of movement displaced an older logic of registration, while the modern state retained the register’s power to connect identity with civic duties and official existence.