New ID System Off to a Rough Start in Japan
Technical glitches and grass-roots resistance atypical of Japan accompanied Monday’s debut of the country’s first national identification system, a registry designed to battle bureaucracy by centralizing personal data.
The system will assign an 11-digit identification number much like the U.S. Social Security number--to each of Japan’s 126 million citizens and gather basic information on each in a networked central database: name, address, sex and birth date.
Under the system, each local government will be responsible for entering the data and each citizen will be issued a photo ID card.
The idea is to allow people to more easily process social benefits and obtain passports and other official documents, cutting down on red tape among municipal, prefectural and national governments.
But opponents say the system tramples individual privacy.
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