We received a question from a lawyer in New York. He married a Romanian citizen recently who, he has now discovered, was married in 2009 to a Japanese man in Kagoshima. He would like to hire a Japanese lawyer to find out about the marriage, and, most importantly, whether a divorce was finalized, and possibly obtain legally verified copies of these documents.
In Japan, both marriages and divorces are recorded in a citizen's family register or koseki (戸籍). Let me explain a bit about koseki first.
The koseki system was created as a means of registering and proving individuals' details related to family. Important events in a person's life, from birth until death, are recorded chronologically in their koseki. Specifically, a person's name, sex, date and place of birth (and, eventually, death), information about parents, marital details (spouse's name, date of marriage, date of divorce) and information about issues such as parental authority and inheritance are all recorded in the document.