Not familiar with Japan, Japanese or Japanese culture, is this true? If it's true, what is the arguments for having such a law?
In Japan, the public, legal family records track children by gender-specific birth order, e.g. "First son, first daughter, second son".
If your first 'son' later needs to change gender this is a bad relational database problem! You can't have two first daughters since they aren't twins. The trans daughter can't be added as a second daughter, because then the age order would be wrong and there would be no first son. You'd have to either wipe out the ordering or bump up the second son to first son, and first daughter down to second, making them useless as primary keys. I don't remember how Japan typically solves this.
It's funny because in America, to my knowledge we don't even track that, it doesn't matter. It's just a Japanese tradition that only worked while everyone was presumed to be cis.
For us in America, only the parent-child relationship is tracked, by birth certificates, and luckily most people live in states where those can be amended. (I don't like changing a historical record, but otherwise I'd have to haul around name change receipts to anyone who wonders why my legal gender and name on some documents doesn't match other documents, and it's just a PITA)
I think I learned it from the English translation of "The bride was a boy" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bride_Was_a_Boy
First child, second child, etc. who cares about the sex or gender!?
This problem appears in other related areas too. Many people think that the right way to fix racisim is to make everyone obsessed about their racial identity.
I get it; it all started because it's right to feel people proud and not ashamed of what they are, but I think going too far in that direction is backfiring greatly
Everybody on the family register record shares the same surname. Non-citizens are listed as distrinct references (for foreign spouses and the like) and they may have a different surname from the household record.
There is more to it than this but that is the key thing to know about the system.
I'm also told that Polish law has some strict limitations on baby names.
My understanding of both is that they want to preserve their culture. Feels like a weird kneejerk to me, raised in a culture where it's normal to just invent new spellings for old names.
Let me guess, you're an American (or Canadian, etc.)?
One annoying tic that Americans frequently have, when encountering a cultural difference (outside a few specific superficial areas like food), is they take the position that the American way is the right way and any other ways are less than. They frequently do this while simultaneously professing how tolerant and accepting they are of other cultures.
Basically, I feel Americans really want cultural difference eliminated in favor of a bland, AirSpace [1] liberalism, except for some funny hats and exotic Instagrammable cuisine.
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2016/8/3/12325104/airbnb-aesthetic-..., https://www.theguardian.com/news/2024/jan/16/the-tyranny-of-...
Spanish people are loud and gregarious. Except one of the most introverted people I’ve met is from Spain.
Labeling entire countries as having some annoying trait you dislike is stereotype-driven thinking.
It's not that strict. It's basically ensuring that if you want to give your child a name it will need to be actual human name (recognizable as a name in Poland) not something offensive or random. It's basically a law to prevent parents from harming their children by naming them something retarded they found fashionable at the time.
It's enough that you burdened your child with life. Further harming it with a weird "name", the Polish law considers a bit much.
You can download a list of names of living Polish people who have national id number assigned (everybody?) here: https://dane.gov.pl/pl/dataset/1667,lista-imion-wystepujacyc...
It doesn't contain names that only a single citizen has.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/feb/20/japan-married-...
This is coming from a somewhat anecdotal place. But as a married person in the US whose partner didn't change names, it's not been an issue at any point in the last 10 years of marriage. Not once have I had to explain to someone "oh yeah, we're legally married." If anything, in our case so far it would have been inefficient for us to go through the time filing paperwork to get one of our names changed to the other's. Which, is exactly why we never bothered in the first place. What a waste of time (in our eyes.)