Hoju system

The Hoju system organized family registration around a male patriarch: every family member was registered under the family head. In the novel, its significance lies both in this formal rule and in the distance between changing the law and changing the ordinary expectations that shaped family decisions. The system’s eventual abolition made a different arrangement legally possible, but did not make that option customary.

Definition and Historical Challenge

Under the Hoju system, the patriarch served as the organizing head of the family record. Opposition to this arrangement gathered force in the late 1990s, when organizations began arguing for its abolition. Some people publicly used both parents’ surnames, while a few celebrities spoke about being picked on as children for having a different surname from their fathers. These examples brought the system’s assumptions into public view: a child’s name could mark departure from the paternal line and invite social scrutiny.

The system also became a subject of popular discussion through a television drama about a single mother raising a child on her own who faced the prospect of losing custody to the child’s father, described as neglectful. The story helped Kim Jiyoung understand what was absurd about the Hoju system. At the same time, opponents of abolition argued that ending it would turn blood relations into strangers and make Korean society savage. The debate therefore concerned more than record-keeping: it exposed conflicting ideas about whether family bonds depended on patriarchal registration.

Legal Reform and Family Registration

In February 2005, the Constitutional Court of Korea found the Hoju system incompatible with the constitutional guarantee of gender equality. The system was abolished in January 2008 and replaced by a new law. Under the replacement, there was no longer a family registry of the old kind; people lived under an individual identification system instead.

The reform also changed the rules available to parents. A newborn was no longer required to take the father’s surname, and a couple could decide when signing their marriage registration to give a child the mother’s surname and family origin. That option was legally possible, but uncommon: the account notes only 200 cases of children taking their mother’s name since the system’s abolition in 2008. The contrast between legal availability and limited use shows the reform’s reach and its limits without suggesting that the law itself compelled families to choose one surname over another.

The Marriage Form and a Family Choice

The changed law enters Kim Jiyoung’s life through a practical document. As she and Jung Daehyun filled out their marriage paperwork at the dining table, they reached a section asking whether they agreed that their child would take the mother’s surname and family origin. Jung Daehyun remarked that Jung was a decent surname. Kim Jiyoung explained that most people still used their father’s surname and that a child with the mother’s name would prompt questions, explanations, and corrections. She marked no herself.

Her decision was not presented as a simple endorsement of the rule. She felt bad as she checked the box, recognizing that the law had changed while smaller rules, contracts, and customs continued to direct people toward the familiar choice. The form made the system’s legacy tangible: a legal option existed, but choosing it could make a family’s decision conspicuous and require it to be repeatedly explained.

Formal Change and Continuing Expectations

The Hoju system’s abolition altered the formal basis of family registration, yet Kim Jiyoung’s experience highlights how institutional change can coexist with durable custom. The marriage form offered a choice, while the surrounding expectation that children take their father’s surname made one answer seem ordinary and the other liable to attract attention. The small act of marking no thus registers both a personal decision and the persistence of a patrilineal norm after the rule that had organized family records around a patriarch was gone.