Married couples are said to be of "one mind, one body" — a phrase that appears in "Kakan'o," a novel published in the late 1880s by Suehiro Tetcho, a writer of Japan's Meiji era. That saying is now fading into the past. Couples today receive their salaries in separate accounts and pool living expenses in a joint account. When they buy a home, many register it under both names. Of the 756,358 couples in their first marriage in 2024, 59.7% were dual-income households, and 16.5% of the homes they owned were registered jointly, according to Statistics Korea. Marriage may be described as merging two households, but this is no longer an era in which forming a family means consolidating income and assets under one person's name.
It was not always this way. The Civil Act, enacted in 1958, presumed that marital property with no clear owner belonged to the husband as his separate property. If no one knew whose share it was, it was treated as the husband's. After a campaign by women's groups to revise family law, the Civil Act was amended in 1977 so that such property is presumed to be jointly owned. In 1991, spouses gained the right to claim a division of assets upon divorce. In 1999, a split-pension system was introduced, allowing a spouse to receive part of the old-age pension accumulated during the marriage. The number of split-pension recipients rose from 11,802 in 2014 to 99,818 as of June 2025. The recognition that each spouse contributes to jointly built assets and retirement income has taken hold in law and policy.
The "one pension per person" plan being pursued by the National Pension Service appears to be an extension of that shift. Under the current system, married people without income whose spouse earns an income are excluded from coverage. The service is working on a plan to enroll 6.67 million such people, along with young adults without income, as regional subscribers. The move seeks to reshape the framework of the National Pension, which was designed in 1988 on the assumption of single-income households, to fit changed patterns of life. Marriage should not be a reason to erase the contribution and rights of either spouse. A relationship in which each accepts the other's differences while sharing the responsibilities of life. The meaning of marriage, too, is evolving beyond "one mind, one body" toward what might be called "two minds, one body."