Japan's Household Registration System (koseki seido) is an extremely powerful state instrument, and is socially entrenched with a long history of population governance, social control and the maintenance of social order. By looking through the lens of the koseki system, the book takes both an historical as well as a contemporary approach to understanding Japanese society. In doing so, it develops our understanding of contemporary Japan within the historical context of population management and social control; reveals the social effects and influence of the koseki system throughout its history; and presents new insights into citizenship, nationality and identity.

1. Introduction, Part I: Early History 2. Household Registration and the Dismantling of Edo Outcaste Cultures 3. Early Modern Osaka Hinin and Population Registers Part II: Nation, Empire and Occupation 4. The Development of the Modern 5. Creating Spatial Hierarchies: The Koseki, Early International Marriage and Intermarriage 6. Managing 'Strangers' and 'Undecidables': Population Registration in Meiji Japan 7. Sub-nationality in the Japanese empire: a social history of the koseki in colonial Korea 1910-1945 8. Blood and Country: Chugoku Zanryu Koji, Nationality and the Koseki 9. Jus Koseki: Japanese Citizenship as Administrative Household Membership Part III: The Present 10. Gender Identity, the Koseki and Human Rights 11. Sexual citizenship at the intersections of patriarchy and heternormativity-same-sex partnerships and the koseki 12. Birth Registration and the Right to Have Rights: The Changing Family and the Unchanging Koseki 13. Officially Invisible: The Mukokusekisha (Stateless) and Mukosekisha (Unregistered) 14. Challenging the Heteronormative Family in the Koseki: Surname, Legitimacy, and Unmarried Mothers