#i know i am thinking further than the JAPANESE GOVERNMENT regarding kosekis

[aprito]

she is so painfully oblivious due to her absolute WORST NOTIONS OF ROMANCE sakura hurry up and wife this man!!!!

in modern aus I usually have both of them keep their names (which in sasori's case is his akasuna title) because I like both too much to pick one but in same age au ninjaverse THIS IS THE ONLY POSSIBLE OPTION DUE TO NO LAST NAME he respects it

[stillness-in-green]

The Weight of a Name

Some meta on Shigaraki, Kotaro, All For One, and the Japanese adoption system.  

So, I was thinking the other day about Shigaraki, family names, and the illustration of power that is All For One wresting Shigaraki from the Shimura family into his own.  To wit: I had occasionally wondered about Kotaro's resentment of his mother; about whether his adoptive parents, whoever they were, were cruel or distant with him, or whether he was so deeply wounded by his perceived abandonment that no arrangement would have been happy or supportive enough to lessen his trauma.  Also, why in heaven's name wasn't his name changed?  If Nana was concerned that All For One might hurt him to get at her, why wasn't the simplest and most basic aspect of his identity, his family name, altered?  Upon further reflection, though, I remembered some of what I've read about family law in Japan and came to a realization: I don't think Kotaro was adopted.  This has significant implications for both his own upbringing and the statement All For One makes in “adopting” Tenko.  

While adoption numbers look high in Japan--the second-highest in the world--in reality, over 90% of adoptions in the country are adult adoptions of men in their 20s-30s, usually for the purposes of inheriting businesses.  Foster care is rare now and was once even rarer; the majority of children in the care of Japanese child services grow up in overcrowded, understaffed institutions, and scant few of these children are even eligible to be adopted due to family law stating that putting a child in an orphanage does not equate to surrendering one's parental rights.  Often, children are placed in orphanages due to the parents' financial difficulty or history with abuse, with the possibility that they might come back for those children when they get their lives back on track--though in reality, this is quite rare.  

Why are these ties kept so strong?  Well, it goes back to family ties and bloodlines, and the ways in which modern Japanese society is built around those things on some very, very bedrock levels.  In the West, we have individual documents for our major life events, but in Japan, since the 1870s, there has been the koseki.  

The koseki is a family registry--one is entered into one's parents' registry at birth, with all information about the family's births, deaths, marriages, divorces and adoptions being kept in the same place.  The registry for a given family is maintained for two generations, with children typically only beginning their own family registries when and if they marry--sometimes not even bothering until they have a child!  The koseki--theirs and each of their parents'--will also have references to one another, allowing a diligent person to track a family line and its major events back for generations by simply following the paperwork.  Being recorded in a koseki is the primary indicator of Japanese citizenship.  "Family" as recorded in the koseki governs inheritance rights, and in turn carries expectations about children looking after their parents in the latter's old age.  While in recent years, limits have been placed on who can access koseki, as recently as 2008, anyone who was even curious about someone else's koseki could walk into the relevant government office and ask to see it for only a basic fee.  This contributes to enormous privacy concerns and societal pressure to not do anything that would "sully" the family koseki, as doing so could not impact just peoples' views of you, but of everyone else in your family.  (cite)

The whole schema for the koseki assumes a heterosexual, nuclear family dynamic, with a predictable difficulty in forcing that framework fit outlying cases--single parents, international or same-gender marriages, divorce, surrogacy arrangements, gender changes, and--most relevant to this discussion--adoption.  Because of the perceived sanctity of the koseki, adoption of children for purposes other than inheritance remains vanishingly rare--combine that with the rarity of parents who give up their children ever returning for them, and what you have are too many children in too few facilities, a recipe for misery.  Children in Japanese orphanages are often considered--by both people in society at large and even the children themselves--as "unwanted."  Studies about children who grew up in such institutions suggest they lag behind the rest of their age group in development and in school, that they have little experience in forming long-term bonds with others; "many struggle with basic interpersonal skills like empathy and regulating their emotional state."  Adults who come out of such institutions often fail to finish school or seek higher education and wind up working low-paying jobs or relying on government assistance. (cite, but also see: Bubaigawara Jin)  

While Kotaro--if he was raised in an orphanage--clearly overcame the odds very admirably regarding his schooling and employment, he equally clearly came out of the experience still nursing emotional scars and ill-equipped to deal with children of his own.  This glacial societal resistance to mucking with family records probably also explains why his name was never changed--if he was never adopted by another family, there would be no other koseki to register him to, and Japan doesn't have a witness protection program.  

What all of this illustrates to me--along with shedding some light on what Kotaro's childhood post-Nana was probably like--is what exactly is being communicated by All For One's adoption and subsequent renaming of Shimura Tenko.  Kotaro was leashed to the Shimura name all his life, even after his mother gave him up, even after she died.  He could never escape his status as "an unwanted child"; anyone who wanted to look him up could do so (including, very possibly, All For One himself, depending on how much of Shigaraki's backstory you think was orchestrated from the beginning).  

By contrast, Tenko is severed cleanly from the Shimura family name, given another name not listed on any koseki (at least not one updated within the last two hundred years).  He's cut out of the Shimura family entirely, adopted at a young age by a man who wants him, a man with such utter disregard for societal systems and values that he's able to just take the child he wants, difficulties with adoptions and names and family registers be damned.  In a stroke, at his whim, the unyielding weight of Shimura is nullified, and instead, Tenko becomes Shigaraki Tomura, a child who doesn't exist anywhere.  Not recorded on a koseki, he is thus without family or nationality, his Quirk unrecorded, his date of birth unknown.  There is nowhere any proof of his existence.  All told, it's a pretty profound statement about the lengths All For One is willing (and happy) to go to in stamping out all traces of the One For All bearers' legacies.

(...And yet, perversely, Shigaraki also kind of fits the model for Japanese adoption--All For One explicitly intends him to be a successor, after all.  In that light, you could say that he was adopted into the Shigaraki family to inherit the family business.  I have to imagine that All For One thought this was pretty funny, though probably no one else agrees with him.)  

A note: The stats and info I reference above are relevant to modern-day Japan and, of course, My Hero Academia isn't set in modern-day Japan, not quite.  It's set in Japan 200-300-odd years in the future, with the caveat that the development of super-powers and the resulting massive social upheaval stunted societal and technological growth  such that the setting still looks mostly like modern-day Japan, only with super-powers.  That being the case, do we assume that the ongoing updates to the koseki system had already been made as of the emergence of Quirks, enduring through the plot as we know it, or do we assume that changes to the system were made on a roughly even time-scale as in modern times--e.g. did employers stop being able to ask for a copy of one's koseki in 1974 or merely "forty-five years ago"?  

Given the chaos that was wrought by the appearance of Quirks, the alleged lawless periods, as well as the existence of a mandatory Quirk registry and the phenomenon of "Quirk marriages," I am disinclined to believe that the problems represented by the koseki have been addressed much at all since early-2000s Japan.  If anything, the conservative influences in the Japanese government that are so resistant to legislating changes to how the koseki functions today would probably have even more reason to push back against those changes if faced with Sudden Super-Powers.  My Hero Academia is intended to speak to a modern Japanese audience--the issues facing its villains, in particular, are reflective of real problems people face in Japan--and thus, to me at least, it's counterintuitive not to interpret the series' characters with that modern Japanese context in mind.  Who is Horikoshi writing for, and what in his society is he trying to comment on?  With that lens in place, I think the koseki is exactly as much a problem in MHA's world as it is our own--possibly even moreso.