Yes and no. The basic principle is one person, one pension. When both spouses are are insured under Employees' Pension Insurance, both are eligible for survivors' benefits, but those' benefits will be reduced by the amount of one's regular Employees' Pension once one starts receiving that pension. In other words, if the survivor has a pension that exceeds the benefits of a survivors' pension, all of the survivors' pension benefits will be suspended; if survivors' benefits exceed one's own Employees' Pension, the survivor will receive just the difference between the two amounts.Beaglehound wrote: ↑Thu Mar 09, 2023 3:01 pmI don’t think that matters, either of you would still be entitled to 75% of the other’s employee based pension...captainspoke wrote: ↑Thu Mar 09, 2023 2:45 pm I guess since both my wife and I always worked, and now collect our respective pensions, I've never wondered about survivorship.
Neither of us was ever the other person's dependent spouse (and still aren't), so I wouldn't expect that we'd be eligible.
As an example, let's say the husband receives 160,000 yen per month as his Employees' Pension and 60,000 yen per month as his Basic Pension, and the wife receives 100,000 yen per month as her Employees' Pension and 60,000 yen per month as her Basic Pension. Their total monthly income while both are alive is 380,000 yen.
If the husband dies first, the wife is technically eligible to receive 3/4 of 160,000 yen, or 120,000 yen, per month as her survivor's pension. However, the 100,000 yen she is receiving on her own account is subtracted from survivors' benefits before they are paid, allowing her to actually collect only the 20,000 difference. Her total income would thus be 180,000 yen, meaning that she would have 200,000 per month less to live on than when her husband was alive.
A further stickler here is that while survivors' benefits are tax-free, a regular Employees' Pension is subject to tax (even though at a reduced rate), which can also affect health-insurance and long-term care insurance rates. So a surviving spouse with her own Employees' Pension will in practice receive somewhat less than a surviving spouse who had been unemployed and who therefore receives full survivors' pension benefits.
Added edit:
It's true that "dependency" is a requirement to receive survivors' benefits, but under pension law, dependency is defined as meeting two conditions: 1) belonging to the same household unit; and 2) having either a gross income (収入) below 8.5 million yen or a net income (所得) below 6.55 million yen. Two retired spouses are unlikely to have difficulty meeting this requirement, so even the relevant Japan Pension Service page doesn't bother to explain it. Rather, it describes the suspension of survivors' benefits for those with their own Employees' Pension. "Dependency" is defined on a separate page.