Abstract
Ensuring personal privacy is one of the most controversial problems in Japan today. Infringement of an individual's rights to privacy have often occured in relation to the system of public access to family registers;that is, the public perusal, or obtaining of certified copies or abstracts of family registers by another person. That being the case, restrictions to access are growing more necessary. Incidentally, the principle of public access to family registers was enacted in the Family Registration of 1898-Meiji 31. This paper aims at clarifing, with the help of the documentary records, the legislative process as it relates to public access to family registers before the Family Registration Law in 1898. This bibliographical report is a preliminary step in the study preparing a thesis on the privacy problems through the family register system.
