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The Justice Ministry, out of consideration for conservative politicians, forced what critics say was a misleading public opinion survey on the issue of allowing married couples to have separate surnames, The Asahi Shimbun learned.

The Cabinet Office, which conducted the “legislation about family” survey, repeatedly asked the Justice Ministry to withdraw its suggested changes for the survey questions, but the ministry refused, official documents obtained by The Asahi Shimbun showed.

The survey was conducted on 5,000 randomly selected people 18 years old or older from December 2021 to January this year.

The results showed that public support for a system that gives married couples the option to have dual surnames had plummeted to a record low 28.9 percent.

The survey used to be conducted through face-to-face interviews, but the latest one was mailed to respondents because of the COVID-19 pandemic.

According to the disclosed documents, the Justice Ministry in July 2021 decided to move forward the schedule of the survey, which had been conducted every five to six years.

Those were not the only changes.

In previous surveys, the question on dual surnames asked respondents to choose from these answers, provided in this order: (1) maintain the status quo; (2) allow married couples to have dual surnames; and (3) allow the use of birth names as business names in a legal system, even if the married couples must use only one surname.

In the 2017 survey, 42.5 percent of respondents said the government should allow married couples to have separate surnames.

A record high 42.2 percent in the latest survey said the government should establish a legal system to let spouses retain their birth names, up 18 points from the previous survey.

For the latest survey, the Justice Ministry and the Cabinet Office’s Gender Equality Bureau had agreed to adjust the questions after some Diet members said they were “hard to understand.”

The ministry proposed dividing up the one question and setting up a new independent question that asks respondents if they think it is necessary to establish a legal system to expand the use of birth names as business names.

The bureau, however, pushed back, saying the central government had yet to fully discuss the issue regarding the legalization of the use of birth names.

The ministry withdrew its proposal and created a reference table to accompany the question. In that table, it used the expression “a legal system that enables (married couples) to widely use their birth names as a business name.”

But the bureau took issue with the term “widely,” saying its vagueness could “mislead public opinion.”

According to the documents, the ministry refused to change the wording because “dropping the term ‘widely’ would not go down well with conservative politicians.”

“It was summed up that we would conduct the survey with an attitude that it should be neutral in order not to receive criticism from various sides,” a senior ministry official said.

Seiko Noda, then state minister in charge of gender equality, criticized the survey when the results were released in March this year.

She said the changed wording and order of the answers created misleading results if compared with previous surveys.

Opposition lawmakers also said the latest survey method was questionable.

Masaki Taniguchi, a professor of Japanese politics at the University of Tokyo, said the survey should have simply asked respondents if they supported or opposed the legalization of dual surnames, and asked separately if they supported or opposed the legal expansion of the use of birth names.

Taniguchi said it is “absurd” for the ministry to give consideration to politicians of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party.

“It undermines the public’s trust in the survey,” he said.

(This article was written by Masatoshi Toda, Akiyoshi Abe and Sachiko Miwa.)

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