The fight for gender equality is not that of women alone. Thankfully, today, even men are challenging several societal norms and are undoing the biased conditioning they were earlier shaped by. A few men who took their wives’ surnames in the past has paved the way for others to do the same – Shuhei Matsuo Post being one of the “others”.
According to a report by South China Morning Post, 35-year-old Shuhei, who is a Tokyo-based businessman, had spent most of his adolescent years in the U.S. However, when he came back to Japan, he was shocked by an “identical crisis” that he experienced. He was expected to meet Japan’s set standard for a man – that which was rooted in chauvinism.
He began noticing the blatant gender bias around him in his everyday life. So when he got married to an American woman named Tina Post in 2017, he didn’t flinch from adopting her surname, thereby going against a stereotypical Japan’s age-old tradition.
Now, in Japan, a married couple can adopt either one of the two surnames. Despite the option for a man to change his surname, 96% of women in the country are the ones to change their surnames. In case both parties want to keep both their surnames, there is no in-between option – you cannot have both surnames hyphenated.
However, both Shuhei and Tina wanted to keep their surnames. So, both decided to use the surname ‘Matsuo Post’.
If only the rest of Shuhei’s journey was as easy as to decide to adopt his wife’s surname. While it took 15 minutes for Tina to update her surname, the same took Shuhei 8 months!
And that wasn’t enough. He had to update his passport, driving licence, credit card, airline mileage card, email account, business card, and bear all the other “administrative burdens”. But he did. He did them all. He also wrote a book named ‘I Took Her Name’ describing his journey.
In an interview, Shuhei points out two basic things that can help bridge the gender inequality.
“Japanese society is unique and discrimination against women is tolerated and accepted as part of daily life. Two things men can do to help fix this is to do more housework and take extended childcare leave. Gender equality benefits everyone, men and women.”
Kudos to Shuhei for going through the tedious process of changing his surname. Fighting stereotypes is never easy. All one has to do is remain persistent!