As of June 8, 2023, same-sex marriage remains illegal in Japan, making it the only G7 country without protections for same-sex couples, according to Reuters. Those protections include things like being able to see your partner in the hospital and make medical decisions for them, inheritance issues and other things that most couples don’t have to worry about. This means that same-sex couples have to find ways around their lack of legal marital status to get those basic conjugal rights, and this slim autobiographical manga is about one of them. : adoption. While that may sound a bit awkward or uncomfortable to some readers because it means one spouse is the legal parent of the other, Yuta Yagi’s Why I Adopt My Husband has does a great job of explaining how he and his wife came to their decision and how the process worked.
One of the most striking features of the story is the way Yagi tolerates homophobia on the part of his readers. That may not stand out to others as it did to me, but given who I am and where I come from, it’s a very sad element of the book. Yagi always feels like he has to justify the fact that he and Kyota want to get married, and this doesn’t just appear in his statements to readers about how he hopes reading about his relationship will help open their minds. readers but also in the tense scenes where he debates coming out to his parents. The biological consent of the parents is required for the adoption procedure and that means both men will need to decide if they want to come out and admit that they are more than just” good friends” or frame the progression of their relationship as just two single guys. those who do not intend to marry are looking to ensure that they are taken care of. Each of Yagi’s parents had different approaches, while Kyota decided not to come out to his parents. By clearly showing how each family’s situation is different, Kyota’s parents completely agreed with his explanation. At the same time, Yagi is much more resistant, even if he doesn’t come out to either of them. His emotional journey is more about reminding his parents that what they want for him and what he wants for himself are not necessarily the same—for example, his father’s dream of grandchildren That is not part of Yagi. vision. There’s something extremely familiar about his efforts to approach his father on the subject, balanced nicely by the way the manga frames it as an RPG boss battle, the kind that The boss’s fate keeps refilling randomly so you have to start. Attack again from the beginning.
The book also raises some interesting questions about gender expectations. This type of adoption works (as explained in the text) because the older person adopts the younger person, meaning that since Kyota is a few months older than Yagi, Yagi will be the one to adopt. This puts Yagi in the position of “wife” in a traditional heterosexual marriage, meaning that Yagi will be the one to bear the other person’s last name. This is something that traditionally, very few people pay attention to – the wife must “integrate” into her husband’s family. It is usually still expected. But when Yagi’s parents learned that their son would be switching family registers, they became upset, even placing conditions on which family tombstone the boy would get after his passing. life. Although not explicitly stated, this is an interesting aspect of marriage that speaks to the idea of subordination of both women and the assumption of a son’s duty to the family. Yagi’s parents are uncomfortable, even if one of them doesn’t realize that this is being done for marital purposes, and that says something about underlying cultural issues.
Despite the serious subject matter, Yagi maintains a relatively light-hearted tone. The book opens by quickly dismantling stereotypes about gay people. It provides easy-to-understand information about the application process. However, much of it revolves around why Yagi and Kyota wanted to get married in the first place: because they love each other and don’t see that changing. They want to be legally present in every aspect of each other’s lives. They were already happy; they’ve been together for decades (having met at Comiket in 1998), and now they have to overcome some difficulties to take the next logical step. All the serious themes are right there in the book – Yagi’s father’s homophobia is perhaps the hardest to tackle with humor – but mostly, the story wants us to understand that this is about two people love each other and want to get married.. That’s it. The simplicity of this subject makes it clear to you how ridiculous it is that they couldn’t get a marriage license like that, making the book an easy read while still lingering in your mind.
At the end of the book. episode, Yagi wrote, “I just want people to realize that people like us exist and they stop hating us for no good reason.” Although this again shows homophobia from the reader, but it’s also a clear reminder of why that was Yagi and Kyota’s assumption. Their stories don’t have to be that difficult, and reading this book is a useful reminder that our experience of the world is not always universal.
