There is no new thing under the sun, said the quotable author of Ecclesiastes a few thousand years ago. Won over by its pith and poetry, we have always regarded that statement as self-evidently true. Lately, though, we have begun to wonder if the exact opposite isn't the case. Sometimes it seems as if each day brings some brand-new thing, from the momentous to the trivial, that must be laboriously grasped and absorbed.
Last week's novelty du jour was one more spinoff from the global "war on terrorism," with its ever-growing requirements for more and better security. Get ready to greet biometric passports. This development probably qualifies as trivial (unlike, say, the invention of the wheel or the introduction of the toothbrush), but there is no denying its newness. Within two or three years, if the Foreign Ministry has its way, Japanese citizens' current passports will seem so last-millennium.
In a bid to increase security and foil counterfeiters, the ministry says, the new passports will include integrated circuit chips containing data on irises, retinas, fingerprints, palm prints, skeletal structure and/or voice characteristics. The precise information to be included is not yet clear, since it must conform to the common standard still being worked out by the Group of Eight industrialized nations in conjunction with the International Civil Aviation Organization.