When Japan’s Marriage Acceptance Certificate Has No Latin Spelling

A Japanese Certificate of Acceptance for a Marriage Notification

The client sent a one-page Japanese marriage acceptance certificate from a city in Tokyo. The husband is Japanese and the wife a foreign national, and neither name appears in Latin letters. The order was for a certified Japanese marriage certificate translation for a U.S. filing.

A 婚姻届受理証明書 (konin todoke juri shomeisho) is a Japanese municipal office’s certificate that it accepted a couple’s 婚姻届 (marriage notification). Article 48 of the Family Register Act lets the person who filed a notification request one. Under Article 739 of the Civil Code, a marriage takes effect upon that notification.

The page itself is titled 受理証明書 (Certificate of Acceptance). Its table lists two 届出人 (notifier) rows, four 事件本人 (persons concerned) slots and a 届出の要旨 (summary of the notification) block. A closing sentence certifies the date the notification was accepted.

The redacted image below shows that table with every name, address, number and date covered.

How We Spelled a Kanji Name and a Katakana-Only Name

For the husband, we romanized the printed reading in Hepburn without macrons, the form Japanese passports use. We kept the certificate’s surname-first order and added the kanji in parentheses.

For the wife, we used the spelling the client supplied with the order. We kept the certificate’s surname-first order, with a comma, and added the katakana in parentheses. The client had written each surname in capitals to mark it; we kept normal capitalization.

Asterisks fill both notifier rows and the two unused persons-concerned slots. Each spouse carries the printed marker (notifier) inside their own entry, so the asterisks are the city’s filler, not missing data. We reproduced them as printed and explained them in a note.

Expert Note

"Translator’s Notes 2–3 from the certificate (names and places replaced with placeholders): 2. The husband’s name follows the phonetic reading printed on the certificate itself (【夫の氏名の振り仮名】[reading in katakana]), in Hepburn without macrons - the form used in Japanese passports. The wife is not a Japanese national, so her name is recorded in the original in katakana only ([surname in katakana]、 [given names in katakana], surname first); it is rendered “[Surname], [Given names]” per the spelling given by the bearer. The name [name in kanji] ([romanized name]), shown as the head of the family register in which the husband was recorded before this marriage, carries no phonetic reading in the original; that romanization is the most common reading of those characters and is best-effort, as is “[place name]” for the sub-municipal component [place name in kanji] of the permanent-domicile address. 3. The two “Notifier” rows and the third and fourth “Persons concerned” slots are printed with runs of asterisks rather than entries. The asterisks are the issuing municipality’s filler for fields not completed on this certificate - both spouses instead carry the printed marker “(Notifier)” within their own entries - and are reproduced here as printed."

Wei LinTechnical & Business Translation Lead

Dates use 和暦 (the Japanese era calendar): 平成 (Heisei) years count from 1989 and 令和 (Reiwa) years from 2019. We converted each date and kept the era year in square brackets, so an invented Heisei 10 date would end in 1998 [Heisei 10]. The wife’s date of birth is marked 西暦 (Western calendar), and its bracket says so.

The summary block restates what the notification set up. It gives the 本籍 (honseki, permanent domicile) after the notification, the register change 新戸籍編製 (new family register compiled) and the husband’s reading. Under Article 16(3) of the Family Register Act, a Japanese national who marries a foreign national gets a new register unless already heading one.

Two items have no printed reading: the name of the head of the husband’s previous register and one part of the address. We used the most common reading and marked both as best-effort.

The client had already ordered from us a translation of a koseki recording the same marriage. We matched every shared field to it, from the names and dates to the permanent domicile.

The certificate is printed on copy-deterrent paper, with the word 複製 (reproduction) as a pale latent pattern across the sheet. A note describes the paper once, so nobody reads the pattern as an annotation on the record. The anti-counterfeiting notice printed at two corners is translated in brackets.

The Outcome

CertTranslate delivered the certified translation in August 2026 for the client’s U.S. filing, built to the USCIS certification standard (8 CFR 103.2(b)(3)). The packet held the one-page translation in the original’s landscape layout, a signed certification page with four Translator’s Notes, and a copy of the original.

The certification page calls the document a Certificate of Acceptance of a Marriage Notification, matching what the city certified.