Originally Posted by
AlwaysAisle
I think it is more likely your wife may get in a situation with immigration officers, not TSA officers. These are two separate department and TSA officers do security screening and boarding pass check at the entrance of security.
TSA ID check and boarding pass check is done manually by a person so they understand maiden name situation.
However, for immigration passport control today is done using automatic kiosk and difference between the name on the passport and a name of an airline passenger list can trigger your wife to go to long slow line to see an officer in a booth. My understanding is that immigration at homeland security gets name of passengers from an airline, hence that kiosk recognize my name from my passport and comes up with my arrival flight information on own without asking me.
This.
For immigration purposes you'll want the passport name (what's listed on the MRZ/"barcode" at the bottom, which should also be the data on the chip) to match the ticket name.
This is primarily an issue for the US if you're travelling on an ESTA (where the airline does electronic validation of this data) - although I'm not sure how strict the matching is (they have the passport number and DOB after all). If travelling on a Visa or Green card then it doesn't really matter too much since a human will verify those. I don't believe Japan do any verification like this, and you're highly unlikely to have issues travelling there as a Japanese citizen.