Abolition of the hoju system

The Abolition of the hoju system was a landmark legal reform that dismantled a family-registration framework organized around a male patriarch. In the novel, its history is set against Kim Jiyoung’s ordinary decisions about marriage and a future child: the law makes a different choice possible, but does not make that choice socially uncomplicated.

The system and the push for change

Under the hoju system, all members of a family had to be registered under its patriarch. The challenge to the arrangement gathered force in the late 1990s, when organizations began arguing for its abolition. Some people publicly used both parents’ surnames; celebrities also spoke about painful childhood experiences of being singled out for having a different surname from their fathers. These accounts made the system’s rules visible in family life, where official registration could shape how a child’s belonging was understood.

The novel also describes resistance to reform. A popular television drama about a single mother who risked losing custody of the child she had raised to an unreliable father helped Kim Jiyoung recognize what was absurd about the system. Yet some people feared that abolishing it would turn blood relatives into strangers and make society savage. The debate therefore concerned more than administrative procedure: it exposed competing ideas about whether family identity depended on a male-line registry.

Constitutional ruling and legal abolition

In February 2005, the Constitutional Court of Korea found the hoju system incompatible with the Constitution’s gender-equality clause. The system was abolished in January 2008 and replaced by a new law. The sequence matters in the novel’s account: the court’s ruling challenged the legal basis of the arrangement before the formal replacement took effect.

The reform also changed the form of family identification. The old family registry gave way to an individual identification system, and a newborn was no longer required to take the father’s surname. When registering their marriage, a couple could choose for a child to take the mother’s surname and family origin instead. The possibility was real but uncommon: the narrative reports only 200 cases of children taking their mother’s name since abolition in 2008.

The reform in Kim Jiyoung’s family

The change enters the story through the marriage-registration form Kim Jiyoung and Jung Daehyun complete at their dining table. One section asks whether a future child will take the mother’s surname and family origin. Jung Daehyun remarks that Jung is a decent surname. Kim Jiyoung explains that most people still use their father’s surname and that a child with the mother’s name would invite assumptions and require repeated explanations. Jung Daehyun nods, and Kim Jiyoung checks no.

Her response is not presented as the absence of a legal option: the form explicitly offers one. Rather, the ordinary interaction shows how custom can narrow the practical meaning of a right. Kim Jiyoung feels uneasy as she marks her answer, recognizing that a changed law has not by itself changed the expectations surrounding family names. The form puts the reform’s promise and its limits side by side: a choice newly permitted by law, and the social friction attached to exercising it.

Significance

The abolition is a clear instance of formal reform confronting the persistence of everyday convention. The legal rule no longer makes the father’s surname compulsory, but the rarity of maternal surnames and Kim Jiyoung’s anticipation of scrutiny show that removing compulsion does not erase a norm. By connecting national legal history to a small mark on a marriage form, the narrative measures change not only by what the law allows, but also by what people can choose without explanation or social cost.