After decades of debate, Japan’s government finally bit the bullet and pushed the country towards a national identification number system. Officials aimed to assign a “My Number card” to every citizen in the country by the end of 2022.
However, it’s now the end of 2021. And by today’s count, only 40% of Japan’s citizens have a card. This, despite the government launching a “cash back” campaign designed to increase uptake.
Why the resistance? Recently, Japan’s Mainichi Shinbun tackled why so many in Japan seem so resistant to jump on the My Number bandwagon.
The Introduction of the My Number System
The whole thing was a mess, and in 2007, officials revealed that some 50 million pension accounts had no identifiable owner. Click To TweetJapan’s government has discussed introducing a national ID system for decades. Until now, ID has been managed through the national family registry (koseki) system. The system has proven effective as a means of verifying identity and lineage. However, it doesn’t offer a simple, convenient way to identify an individual for tax purposes.
The first musings about a national ID system date all the way back to the Satou Eisaku government of 1968. Back then, the government gave it the foreboding name of 国民総背番号 (kokumin sou-sebangou). But it’s hard to make many friends with a name like that. The idea eventually died out.
The idea came back to life in 2007 (Heisei 19). Part of the motivation was a simple desire to simplify tax reporting and the handling of individual data. But it was also a response to the “disappearing pension problem”. In 1997, the government began unifying social security pension accounts under a single uniform identification system. Until then, pension accounts had used different systems and different ID number formats to identify users. The whole thing was a mess, and in 2007, officials revealed that some 50 million pension accounts had no identifiable owner.
In 2013, the National Diet under the second government of Prime Minister Abe Shinzou passed a national ID number law. Seeking to avoid the PR mistakes of the past, officials christened the new system “My Number” (マイナンバー). They hoped that the folksy English phrase would lower people’s resistance and speed adoption.
Sadly, they were wrong.
National ID Card = Free Stuff
My Number is a 12-digit-long format. The first 11 digits are based off of a resident’s resident number code as defined in the national Juki Net system. (The transformation is designed so that a resident’s number can’t easily be reverse engineered.) The 12th digit is a checksum code. Used in other national ID systems and in credit card numbers, the checksum is a calculated value based on the previous 11 digits. It enables computer applications to determine quickly whether a specified My Number value is valid or not, thus reducing typos.
