The Certificate of All Matters (Rikon Todoke Kisai Jikō Shōmeisho)

Two different certificates, one filing

When a marriage in Japan ends by rikon todoke — the divorce notification handed in at the city or ward office — nobody hands you a court decision, because no court was involved. What the office can give you is paper drawn from its own records, and there is more than one kind. The lighter one is the acceptance certificate, the rikon todoke juri shōmeisho, which certifies that the notification was received and accepted. The fuller one is the certificate of the matters recorded in that notification, the rikon todoke kisai jikō shōmeisho, known in English translation as the Certificate of All Matters. The first says an event happened. The second reproduces what was written down about it.

What the fuller record shows

Going only by what the Philippine decisions themselves describe, a Certificate of All Matters carries the substance of the entry rather than a bare confirmation: the date the divorce took effect, the identity of the spouses, the name of the person from whom the divorce was obtained, and that person's nationality. That matters in a Philippine courtroom, where a judge is being asked to accept as a fact that a marriage recorded here was dissolved abroad on a particular date between two particular people.

Moraña: the certificate as corroboration

Juliet Moraña and her Japanese husband applied for divorce before the Office of the Mayor of Fukuyama City, which issued a Divorce Report; the lower courts dismissed her petition partly because no “divorce decree” had been produced. The Supreme Court reversed in Moraña v. Republic (G.R. No. 227605, December 5, 2019), holding that the Divorce Report was itself the equivalent of a decree in Japan, and then pointed to the fuller register certificate as independent support:

Notably, the fact of divorce was also supported by the Certificate of All Matters issued by the Japanese government to petitioner's husband Minoru Takahashi, indicating the date of divorce, petitioner's name from whom he got divorced and petitioner's nationality as well

The Court then said why that paper was admissible at all:

Still another, the Divorce Report, Certificate of All Matters, and Divorce Certificate were all authenticated by the Japanese Embassy. These are proofs of official records which are admissible in evidence under Sections 19 and 24, Rule 132 of the Rules on Evidence

Two practical points. First, the certificate carries weight because it is an official record, not a private paper — and only once it is authenticated. Second, notice whose name it was in: the husband's. A certificate issued in your former Japanese spouse's name still proves your divorce, because you appear in it as the person from whom he was divorced. Petitioners often assume a document they cannot personally request is useless to them. It is not.

Ng: what the En Banc accepted

The same family-register evidence carried the day on the fact of divorce in Republic v. Ng (G.R. No. 249238, February 27, 2024, En Banc), where the Court set out the accepted list:

Here, Ng was able to sufficiently and satisfactorily prove the fact of divorce when she submitted into evidence the following documents: 1) an authenticated Divorce Certificate issued by the Embassy of Japan in the Philippines; 2) Certificate of Acceptance of Notification of Divorce; 3) Certification by the City Civil Registry Office of Manila acknowledging that a Divorce Certificate was filed and recorded in their office; and 4) an original copy of the Family Registry of Japan issued by the Mayor of Nakano-Ku, Tokyo, Japan with its English translation, evincing that the fact of divorce was duly recorded in the Civil Registry of Japan.

Read the list as a pattern rather than a checklist: an embassy certificate, an acceptance certificate, and the register record, each pointing at the same fact from a different direction. That redundancy is what makes the fact of divorce hard to argue with.

Getting yours ready for a Philippine court

• Ask for the fuller certificate, not just the acceptance slip. Tell whoever requests it in Japan that you need the record of the matters entered, not only proof that a filing was accepted. See getting documents while you are in the Philippines.
• Keep the acceptance certificate too. The evidence sets accepted in the decided cases carried both. See the Certificate of Acceptance as proof.
• Translate it into English. Every register document accepted by the Supreme Court came with a translation. See translating Japanese divorce documents.
• Authenticate it. Japan issues apostilles through its Ministry of Foreign Affairs; in the decided cases the papers carried Japanese Embassy or Philippine consular authentication. See apostille of Japanese documents.

What this certificate will never do

It proves the fact of your divorce, not the Japanese law that allowed it — two separate burdens in every one of these cases. Moraña itself was sent back to the trial court because the Japanese Civil Code had been shown only through website printouts, and Ng was remanded because the Code came in as an unauthenticated photocopy — in both, the register documents had already done their job. Build the fact-of-divorce file well, then settle the law before filing rather than after a remand. The full sequence is on the Japan divorce recognition guide, with the detail on proving Japanese law and the documents checklist. To have your papers reviewed before anything is filed, book a consultation.

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