A surprisingly resilient news story over the past year has been the phasing out of hanko seals and stamps, once considered indispensable for legal documents in Japan. Foreign news services treated such seals as another quaint feature of Japanese life, but, as the COVID-19 pandemic took hold, the problems attendant to their use, which require face-to-face encounters between parties finalizing a process, became more pronounced, so much so that the government has positioned the digitization of these processes as a priority and is creating a special agency to make it a reality.
On Feb. 9, the Asahi Shimbun explained the goals of the new agency, one of which, according to digital transformation minister Takuya Hirai, is to be able to conclude any administrative procedure in less than a minute on a smartphone. The main tool will be the My Number identity card that is being distributed to every resident of Japan.
A three-part series that appeared in Tokyo Shimbun last December gave some indication of what kinds of procedures the new system may replace. Reporter Chiaki Sawada returned from a three-year assignment in London last fall and found that re-entering Japanese society as a citizen was more difficult than trying to enter British society as a foreign national.