Photo/Illutration Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi, third from right, attends a meeting of the Council for Gender Equality at the prime minister’s office on Dec. 12. (Asahi Shimbun file photo)

“So, two cheers for democracy,” wrote Edward Morgan Forster (1879-1970).

Better known as E.M. Forster, the 20th-century English author is famed for novels such as “A Room with a View."

He explained his reasoning in his 1938 essay “What I Believe”: “One because it admits variety and two because it permits criticism.”

According to Takeshi Onodera (1931-2018), a scholar of English literature who translated Forster’s collected works, Forster argued that while democracy deserves defending, its limitations must also be acknowledged.

In the same essay he cautions, “Two cheers are quite enough: there is no occasion to give three.”

Today, we face a troubling disruption of the policymaking process—one that threatens to render this nation’s democracy unworthy of two cheers and perhaps reduce it to zero-cheer status.

In the formulation of the government’s "Basic Plan for Gender Equality," new wording was abruptly inserted into a Cabinet Office draft without prior discussion at meetings of the Council for Gender Equality, an advisory body tasked with helping shape the plan.

The added language aligns with Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi’s administration’s push to counter calls for a system that would allow married couples to keep different legal surnames if they wish.

Instead, the initiative seeks to expand the use of pre-marriage surnames (maiden names) as broadly accepted “commonly used names” in, for example, workplaces and other professional settings. However, a person's legal surname would still change after marriage.

The draft contained no explicit reference to a selective separate-surname system for married couples.

This also reflects an agreement between the ruling Liberal Democratic Party and its junior coalition partner, Nippon Ishin (Japan Innovation Party), to pursue enacting a law next year. 

This would give legal recognition of pre-marriage surnames in all aspects of social life while maintaining the rule that married couples may have only one legal surname.

There is every reason to suspect that the unexplained late-stage change stemmed from so-called “sontaku”—officials pre-emptively acting on what they believed to be their superiors’ unstated wishes.

Because some council members were not informed of the added language and objections were raised, the planned submission of the panel’s recommendations to Takaichi was hastily postponed.

Allowing for diversity and criticism—and debating issues exhaustively even when views diverge—is a fundamental principle of democracy. It has been less than two months since Takaichi took office, yet I already feel anxious at signs that this foundation is beginning to shake.

Forster’s novels excel at portraying people with different values encountering one another, failing to understand each other, and sliding into conflict and struggle.

Perhaps he limited his cheers to “two” because he had reached a frame of mind shaped by a calm, clear-eyed view of the gap between democratic ideals and reality.

—The Asahi Shimbun, Dec. 17

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Vox Populi, Vox Dei is a popular daily column that takes up a wide range of topics, including culture, arts and social trends and developments. Written by veteran Asahi Shimbun writers, the column provides useful perspectives on and insights into contemporary Japan and its culture.

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