The Legislative Council, an advisory body to the justice minister, is now discussing a revision to the part of the Civil Code related to inheritance, with a view to increasing surviving spouses' shares of estates. The council should deliberate carefully so that the proposed amendment, which the Justice Ministry hopes to submit to the Diet, would be acceptable in a society experiencing diversification in the forms of marriage and family amid the rapidly graying population.

The council's discussions were prompted by a 2013 Supreme Court ruling that found unconstitutional the Civil Code's stipulation in Article 900 that the share of inheritance for a child born out of wedlock should be half that of a legitimate child. While the article has since been revised, the ministry launched a working group to review all of the Civil Code's provisions dealing with inheritance. A report compiled by the group in January serves as the foundation for the council's discussions.

A major point of the report is a proposal that estates of the deceased be divided into two portions — one that was built up jointly by couples during their marriages and the other representing what deceased spouses already owned prior to getting married. As a means of increasing the inheritance of surviving spouses, the report proposed that their share in inheritance from the first portion of the estate be made larger than that of the children.