14 ms·

Japan’s koseki system: dull, uncaring but efficient

222 points by Thevet 10y ago

grzm 10y ago
Interesting. This in particular stood out to me: [T]he koseki ... is an integral part of Japanese family law that doesn’t actually care about families beyond ensuring that the legally significant aspects of them are identifiable to the Rest of the World. Thus, a koseki extract today will show a marriage, but not whether the spouses are living together. The system also doesn’t care (i.e., show) if the registered father is not the biological father. It doesn’t care whom the kids live with after a divorce or if a divorced parent is paying maintenance or how often (or if) he sees his children.
- nether 10y ago
  Using the code tag for blockquoting puts mobile viewers in side scrolling hell. This is what I see: http://i.imgur.com/sQhfLlR.jpg http://i.imgur.com/sQhfLlR.jpg.
  - draw_down 10y ago
    I mean, taking normal prose and putting it in a pre tag is kind of a silly practice. I know we're hackers here and everything but that's actually not a great way to display anything but what it's intended for.
  - grzm 10y ago
    Thanks for letting me know! Too late to update the original, so here's the text again: > [T]he koseki ... is an integral part of Japanese family law that doesn’t actually care about families beyond ensuring that the legally significant aspects of them are identifiable to the Rest of the World. Thus, a koseki extract today will show a marriage, but not whether the spouses are living together. The system also doesn’t care (i.e., show) if the registered father is not the biological father. It doesn’t care whom the kids live with after a divorce or if a divorced parent is paying maintenance or how often (or if) he sees his children.
    - mcguire 10y ago
      That interested me as well. Is there another system to record biological ancestry (potentially important for medical reasons), child custody (and who decides which gets custody in case of a conflict), and child support?
  - Senji 10y ago
    Does HN even support a blockquote?
    - dom0 10y ago
      No
- smallnamespace 10y ago
  Legal systems define an abstract interface between individuals in a society. It's interesting how Japan's registration system choose different entities and different 'ACL rules' compared to, say, US common law. Seems like it'd be tricky to build a koseki-like registration here. Legal abstractions have a lot of inertia, and usually requires some sort of war or revolution to precipitate change. For example, most of Western Europe's legal systems are based on the Napoleonic code, spread by conquest, and was largely written after the French Revolution to sweep away the last vestiges of the monarchy and feudalism. Japan's modern koseki system was created right after the Meiji Restoration.
  - grzm 10y ago
    Spitballing here: Could there be a way to set up some quasi-legal certification service that augments rather than replaces the existing system?
    - smallnamespace 10y ago
      Sure, the federal government could set something up, but I think the tricky part is getting all the individual states to adopt the system. Two things to note though: the Japanese registry system was originally set up so the government could keep track of its people, and given the level of anti-government paranoia in the US, I highly doubt that sort of change would get support. A majority of Americans don't even support a uniform ID card for all citizens, which almost every other country has.
      - grzm 10y ago
        Indeed, part 2 of the piece includes: > The national koseki system thus started as part-demographic information collection system, part-surveillance apparatus. > The current Japanese preoccupation with privacy may thus reflect recent historical experience of not actually having any.
      - Muromec 10y ago
        >Sure, the federal government could set something up, but I think the tricky part is getting all the individual states to adopt the system. It doesn't even need to be on federal level. Just think about it - koseki was designed mid-19 century and used paper records held by municipality. Churches in Europe kept paper books noting marriages, births and deaths even before that. The downsides are obvious: - in case of need you should go to same municipality and get extract from same book where event was recorded; - you only can make record in book of municipality where you are resident.
Aloha 10y ago
Does anyone have the link to the second part?
- ivank 10y ago
  http://www.japantimes.co.jp/community/2016/07/10/issues/japans-discriminatory-koseki-registry-system-looks-ever-outdated/ http://www.japantimes.co.jp/community/2016/07/10/issues/japa... via the author's RSS feed http://www.japantimes.co.jp/author/colin-pa-jones/feed/ http://www.japantimes.co.jp/author/colin-pa-jones/feed/
  - grzm 10y ago
    Thanks for the link!
userbinator 10y ago
As a developer, the word that comes to mind for an analogy is "changelog".
kijin 10y ago
Official documents are marvelous. Once you have lived in a country where you can get official documents for pretty much anything you care to prove, it feels like going back to the stone age when you move to a country where you can't. Case in point: a Korean relative of mine was recently invited to join the board of an organization based in the UK. The UK org's bank wanted proof of address for the new board member, in the form of a notarized translation of a recent utility bill or credit card statement. In Korea, you can walk into any local government office and use a 24/7 self-serve kiosk to print out an official proof of your address. Not some random address like the Japanese koseki, but the actual address where you pay all your taxes and are registered to vote. You can even get it in English if you want. It comes with an official stamp and a cryptographic signature of its contents. But no, the UK bank won't take it. They want your fucking credit card statement. Ditto for marriage certificates, death certificates, driving and other licenses, public education, land ownership, car and boat ownership, tax returns... pretty much anything a person might need to prove in the course of their lives. Lost the original? No big deal. You can get a new one whenever you want, wherever you want. You can even get the government to prove your employment history for you, if you're worried that your last employer might go bust and become unable to provide references. And I don't think this makes us any more of a surveillance state than other countries, because the government is supposed to retain official records of all these things anyway. It's just a matter of letting citizens export their own information in a convenient and reliable format.
- grzm 10y ago
  That does sound convenient. Are there safeguards in place for personal privacy? Can anyone look up information on anyone else?
  - kijin 10y ago
    Most information is only available to the person whom it concerns, or close family members. Some information, such as land ownership, is publicly available. If you're printing out a document for the purpose of proving something specific to someone else, you can often request that irrelevant information (such as ID numbers) be redacted for privacy.
losteverything 10y ago
Stupid question. Do Japanese believe using the courts is a cultural nono? In the USA there are definitely two types. Those that sue and those that feel it is sleazy or wrong.
- cm3 10y ago
  I haven't been to Asia (yet), but I can say that in the "Western World" courts are overloaded with cases that should probably not go further than your local ombudsman which in itself is a very old concept found in millenia old civilizations, predating the court system as we know it. This is probably why courts in the US have quick processing of a group of independent, alleged criminal offenders. It's unfair to those accused of breaking the law as it is to the lawyers and maybe even the judge who has to decide in two minutes whether the accused should go to jail/prison while the case is progressing. I'm afraid to suggest fixing the latter, because law enforcement organizations would likely push for legislation to make it quicker and easier to put people in real prison without a hearing or trial.
Muromec 10y ago
It's pretty much same in ex-USSR countries. Even if you get divorce papers in court, you would still need to go with them to registry office and that's where divorce would really happen. The downside is, that sometimes you would need to go to that exact registry office where your marriage was registered, name changed or your child born and it can be thousands of kilometers away from where you live now.
StephenAmar 10y ago
Isn't this system similar to the one we have in France (and other parts of Europe: Livret de Famille. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Family_register https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Family_register
- ekianjo 10y ago
  Yeah i think its about the same thing.
- Aaargh20318 10y ago
  It sound exactly like the 'burgerlijke stand' (civil status) we have in the Netherlands.
- javiermaestro 10y ago
  Yeah, exactly like in Spain, where all these things are done in the Civil Registry (Registro Civil). I mean, the article is like a huge WTF... somebody needs to travel / read about other countries, etc...
- dirtyaura 10y ago
  Yes, I think most of the developed world has something like a citizen register/family register. I think it is the Anglo-American culture that is the interesting diversion from the norm. For some historical reason, they have aversion to id numbers and central registers.
  - atemerev 10y ago
    And yet, they can't help it, hence NSA. I doubt that anywhere in continental Europe there is a full-scale surveillance program like administered by NSA or GCHQ (or maybe we are unusually good at keeping secrets -- really doubt it, though).
    - Muromec 10y ago
      >And yet, they can't help it, hence NSA. I doubt that anywhere in continental Europe there is a full-scale surveillance program like administered by NSA or GCHQ Just reminder that KGB is still a thing and they have SORM: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SORM https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SORM
adrianratnapala 10y ago
From reading the article, I see three aspects: * Koseki as a data structure: It seems to be an event-log from which you can get an official certificate (extract) relfecting the current state. This is better than a systems where you work with loose records of the events themselves. Other countries should do the same thing. * Koseki as a rigid record of official categories: Soft cultural issues are important here. Koseki happens to force people to change their name upon marriage, but makes official gender-change easy. The Japanese shrug at both aspects. But English-speaking polities would not shrug, because they have an expectation that legal categories reflect these personal preferences [1]. This is a cultural thing that no data structure will fix. * Koseki as an alternative to the courts: As long as people will get upset about the categories, and as long as people are allowed to have their legal say, these things will end up in court. [1] For example, in the UK a "civil partnership" was a marriage-by-another-name arrangment for gay couples (before full marriage was extended to them in 2013). This resulted in complaints from heterosexual couples who wanted to get civil partnerships too.
- Muromec 10y ago
  > Other countries should do the same thing. Where other countries means "US", where everybody is paranoid and doesn't want government to have any kind of database on people. In Ukraine we have this level of crazy people who refuse to obtain personal tax number citing religious beliefs (something-something chipization, devil numbers) that for some reason are promoted by Moscow Church, but not by local one.
  - cm3 10y ago
    Curious, is it possible that the restrictive Soviet rule (beginning with Josef and ending with the death of Brezhnev or, if you will, Gorbachev's glasnost+peretroika) caused this, or does it go much further back to Zarist times? What's the underlying explanation?
    - Muromec 10y ago
      Explanation for what exactly? To have your civil acts written in book kept by government - it's definitely not soviet invention, before USSR it was kept by church at least since 18th century.
Aaargh20318 10y ago
Seems like another article where Americans finding out how the rest of the world doesn't use the same retarded systems as they do. What's next, an article about this marvelous invention called 'the metric system' that is used in Bolivia ?
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- _pferreir_ 10y ago
  Exactly my thought. Every European country I've lived in works in pretty much the same way. Of course saying it comes from Japan makes it look more sophisticated ;)
  - eloisant 10y ago
    Actually no, the koseki system or similar can be found in other Asian countries like South Korea but not in Europe. In France you can get a birth certificate, a marriage certificate, and you have a "livret de famille" that regroups all these information but that's a document that you own, not the administration. There is no registry that regroups all the information about a given family. Also note that in Japan, a women getting married will be transferred from her parents' koseki to her husband's koseki. There is no such thing in Europe.
    - kalleboo 10y ago
      European countries don't have a family-centered system like the Koseki (or Chinese Hukou; Wikipedia says South Korea abolished their system a decade ago) where a document represents a family. But several of them do have a population register (which is individual-centered, but with references up and down in the family tree). In Sweden you don't get birth or marriage certificates. If you want to prove your birth or marriage, you get your population registry extract which shows that you are registered as existing (proves birth) or married. So they're the same in that they are based on current state rather than collecting event documents. But they're different in that one represents families, whereas the other represents individuals. Japan also has a separate residency register. While the koseki shows who is in a family (birth/parents, marriage/children), the residency register shows where you live now/before (and is used for taxation). European countries with a population register simply use the same registry for both purposes.
ctphipps 10y ago
Nice as this all seems, the process for accessing the information in one's koseki is amazingly primitive. Most times that you need to do something official in Japan as a Japanese citizen, a copy of your koseki is required. Open a bank account and you'll need one. Apply for a passport and you'll need one etc. You'll not only need an original hard copy transcript of your koseki (tōhon/short-form or shōhon/long-form), but it will need to be dated within the last 3 months. How do you get one? Online? No. Got to visit your city/village/ward office. Any local city/village/ward office? No, it's got to be within the district where your koseki is held. OK, let's take a trip back to our hometown in the evening - surely there's a 24 hour kiosk in the lobby where I can print one out? No. Come during business hours, fill out a paper form requesting a transcript, take a number, wait in line to submit the request form. Go over what you wrote in the request form with an extremely nice and polite bureaucrat. Take another number to wait in line to pay about US$1.50 for the hard copy. Then a final number to pick up the hard copy. Wow. Why's this so hard? Well, although the contents of the koseki are of course computerized, these records are held at the ward/village/city office level and not nationally. Sure, the police, immigration authorities and others likely have a way to access each ward office's system, but as a citizen you have to physically trudge down to the office in the region where your koseki is held and request a copy. Not so bad if you're living near your family (since your koseki is typically kept at the ancestral home of your family, not necessarily where you live day-to-day), but if you've moved across Japan or internationally, you're screwed. Hope you have a family member you can deputise to go get one for you or that you have a good number of frequent flyer points to burn. The article seems to say it's pretty straight forward from overseas at any Japanese consulate. Well, not so much. Strangely enough, write access from overseas is pretty easy. Read access from overseas doesn't exist. Case in point - my wife and I recently had a baby born in the Bay Area who is eligible for Japanese citizenship. No problems, we head to the consulate and fill out the paperwork, provide all the birth proof documents and pay a small fee. The consulate sends the birth details to the city/village/ward office where our koseki is held and that ward office adds our baby to it a week or two later. Now, we need a passport. Can we just ask the consulate to authenticate our baby since they just added him to our koseki? Nope. We have to fly to Japan to visit the city/ward office where our koseki is held, or deputize a family member in Japan to do so for us, obtain a hard-copy of the updated koseki, have it posted to us in California and we then bring it into the consulate to prove our baby's citizenship - citizenship that they themselves just authenticated a few weeks ago. Wow. On top of that, there's no way of knowing when our baby has been added, so we just need to ask our family members to go down once a week for the next few weeks, request and pay for a copy and when our son appears, claim success. So yes, it's a great system, but it's so very paper and physical presence based that it hurts. Surprisingly enough, especially for Japan, foreigners have it easier. Since foreign residents are not on a koseki (well, they are in the case that they're married to a Japanese citizen but only in the "comments" section of the koseki, not the actual core of it and that's a whole 'nother story), none of this paperwork is required when foreigners want to deal with the Japanese bureaucracy. Instead, foreigners are required to carry a plastic ID card (called a "Zairyu card" in its latest permutation) and this has all the necessary information. No 3 month expiry, no ward office visit. So, there's at least one area that non-Japanese have it easier in Japan that citizens!
jmvbxx 10y ago
This is really nothing special at all. Latin American countries based on Spanish Civil Law have the same system (registro civil). As do countries of French origin and even the province of Quebec.
the_mitsuhiko 10y ago
Austria has the same basically. The interior ministry runs a few central registries for these things. You have a unique number hat follows you around and your records are linked through it. It's very convenient. Not only does it simolify tings, it also has some other advantages. For instance becayse your car license olate is through that system linked to your home adress that automatically updates people with Austrian licdnse placea typically do not get clamped.
known 10y ago
Koseki is the root of Burakumin http://www.economist.com/blogs/lexington/2009/09/farewell_to_feer.cfm http://www.economist.com/blogs/lexington/2009/09/farewell_to...
_nalply 10y ago
Swiss here. We have a small red booklet called «Familienbüchlein».
antirez 10y ago
Italy has the same, called "anagrafe", you need to update the registry every time you move to another city or even if you change street, since the registry not only tracks the relationships between individuals but the historical movements of single persons, and is also used in order to make you pay taxes about producing trash. Similarly when a child is born, the first thing to do for the parents is to go to the office and register the newborn, with the ability to recognize it, or not, for both the father and mother, as your child. That is, the mother can pretend that the child she just gave birth is not her, legally, if she is not ready to have a family, and this is considered by Italians a fundamental right of women, even if it is rarely used. It's a bit annoying to deal with this registry normally but it's an useful thing.
- robryk 10y ago
  Interesting case: Poland has an address register that is slowly being deprecated -- it is no longer necessary to ever update it and in increasingly fewer situations a record from that registry is required (and it would be very unpopular if people actually had to report to the government that they've moved). I wonder what are trends related to such registers in other countries.
  - antirez 10y ago
    It is unlikely that it gets deprecated here. It's used for too many things. For instance one part of the free healthcare you get is a local doctor usually a few blocks from where you live where you can go for basic needs. This is also assigned based on your current address.
    - robryk 10y ago
      This also used to be the case in Poland. Now you can choose the GP you go to and change that decision IIRC twice a year. Choosing a doctor that's far away makes no sense, so there's no or little reason to restrict that choice to close doctors.
      - 10y ago
po 10y ago
It is still impossible for couples to register a marriage without one legally assuming the other’s surname, an antediluvian restriction that was nonetheless found constitutional by the Supreme Court last year. Interestingly, a workaround for this is to marry a foreigner. Japanese who marry non-japanese citizens don't need to switch their surnames. As a data format, koseki are interesting because they are tied up with citizenship in a weird way. [1] The spouse variable only holds values of type citizen so people who marry foreigners have their spouse listed in the free-form description section. :-) This has some drawbacks but in the case of having different surnames it gets you around the restriction. [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koseki#Koseki_and_citizenship https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koseki#Koseki_and_citizenship
dschuetz 10y ago
There are two ways handling registration processes. One way is to develop a registration system as little as possible, but then hoping not to deal with the papers later, because of the mess made in the process. Or, you develop a system thoroughly in the first place so that you don't have to deal much with the papers later, because the system was developed to avoid mess. Why patch fundamentally broken systems anyway? Why develop an interdependent system for personal data? There are different questions which reflect exactly the philosophy of eastern and western bureaucracy.
JackFr 10y ago
The real weirdness in the US vs the rest of the world is not that you have to get a court to issue a divorce or that there isn't a central registry, but rather there are literally fifty separate systems, all with slight variations, and you're not locked into a particular one. Divorces used to easier to obtain in Nevada, so people would go there. Certain states adopted same sex marriage before others, so you'd go there.
ardacinar 10y ago
There are a lot of examples here, here's one more; In Turkey, there has been a sort of central family-record keeping thingy for ages. It's centrally held, you don't need to go to your hometown to get one, but you had to go to a government office in your district of residence(you still need to, if you want an official hard-copy) (some records are, like place of residence, are kept locally though(. There was a project to computerize all of the process, mernis, it started in the early 90s and finished sometime around 2007. Since then, for most official businesses, you don't need the official document, just your ID card will do (or for emergencies, just the ID number printed on your ID card). The real odd thing about this system is, for non-usual stuff, you actually need to go to court and sue the government agency for the change. Filing for a divorce? You need to sue NVI for that. Changing your official name? Sue them. Sex change? Not sure about that, but probably yes. Disadvantage to that is having all the state records kept centrally, and knowing how Turkey works, probably under very lax security. In fact, the entire database(at least a copy of it made for the 2009 elections) got leaked earlier this year.
PaulRobinson 10y ago
Basically then, event sourced rather than OO CRUD. Not surprisingly, it makes things easier when distributed, just like in micro-service architectures. I like this a lot. England's Common Law system was created as a means for the powerful to remain powerful, not because it made any sense.
- jacques_chester 10y ago
  > England's Common Law system was created as a means for the powerful to remain powerful, not because it made any sense. The history of the Common Law and Equity is substantially more complex than you are making out.
ghaff 10y ago
I gather that it may vary by state, but in some places in the US it's apparently not even required to register births--which can cause problems for the children involved later on: http://www.radiolab.org/story/invisible-girl/ http://www.radiolab.org/story/invisible-girl/
mcguire 10y ago
One question: who keeps the records? In the US, there is a certain history of suspiciously convenient courthouse fires destroying property records. And then there are accidental fires---my mother late in life could not attend college classes because her high school had burned in the '50s and she had no way of providing she graduated. (I suppose there would be ways around the issue, but she didn't want to bother and thought it was funny.) Anyway, seems like a good way to completely erase someone's existence.
- ghaff 10y ago
  I'm sure it's far less true than it used to be but historically, yes, a lot of US records existed only in paper form in some school or courthouse or town hall where they were subject to being lost in a fire, natural disaster, or just carelessness. Certainly it's been a plot point in many a book or movie where someone assumes an identity chosen because records concerning a person had been lost in some manner. Based on stories I've head over the years, it can actually be quite challenging to get a passport if you can't lay your hands on your birth certificate or if that birth certificate doesn't match up with you because of some mistake or whatever.
jacques_chester 10y ago
This is analogous to the Torrens system of land registration (called a "land registry" in the article), pioneered in South Australia in the mid 1800s. It has almost totally replaced Common Law title everywhere that the Common Law operates. Prior to Torrens, land ownership was under Common Law. You owned land by buying a title or deed from the previous owner, who had bought from someone else, and so on. If the chain was broken, you ran the risk that some day, someone would show up with an unbroken chain that ran back further than yours. Naturally this created an ocean of bitter legislation, often populated by jaunty fleets of fraudulent documents. The Torrens system essentially says: unless it's in the government register, no land ownership or change of ownership is valid. You can sign anything you like, say anything you like, join pinkies and make a pinky promise. Until you update the register, it doesn't matter. It's a simple and effective system. Given that enforcing the law of property is one of the fundamental purposes of governments, it makes sense that they would simplify enforcement for themselves and their citizens. Of course, IANAL, TINLA.
Grue3 10y ago
Also very useful to discriminate against undesirable strata of society. [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burakumin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burakumin Isn't Big Government great?
joshuaheard 10y ago
Great idea. It is similar to the system we have in the U.S. for property records, but for people.

222 points by Thevet 10y ago

grzm 10y ago

Interesting. This in particular stood out to me: [T]he koseki ... is an integral part of Japanese family law that doesn’t actually care about families beyond ensuring that the legally significant aspects of them are identifiable to the Rest of the World. Thus, a koseki extract today will show a marriage, but not whether the spouses are living together. The system also doesn’t care (i.e., show) if the registered father is not the biological father. It doesn’t care whom the kids live with after a divorce or if a divorced parent is paying maintenance or how often (or if) he sees his children.

nether 10y ago
Using the code tag for blockquoting puts mobile viewers in side scrolling hell. This is what I see: http://i.imgur.com/sQhfLlR.jpg http://i.imgur.com/sQhfLlR.jpg.
- draw_down 10y ago
  I mean, taking normal prose and putting it in a pre tag is kind of a silly practice. I know we're hackers here and everything but that's actually not a great way to display anything but what it's intended for.
- grzm 10y ago
  Thanks for letting me know! Too late to update the original, so here's the text again: > [T]he koseki ... is an integral part of Japanese family law that doesn’t actually care about families beyond ensuring that the legally significant aspects of them are identifiable to the Rest of the World. Thus, a koseki extract today will show a marriage, but not whether the spouses are living together. The system also doesn’t care (i.e., show) if the registered father is not the biological father. It doesn’t care whom the kids live with after a divorce or if a divorced parent is paying maintenance or how often (or if) he sees his children.
  - mcguire 10y ago
    That interested me as well. Is there another system to record biological ancestry (potentially important for medical reasons), child custody (and who decides which gets custody in case of a conflict), and child support?
- Senji 10y ago
  Does HN even support a blockquote?
  - dom0 10y ago
    No
smallnamespace 10y ago
Legal systems define an abstract interface between individuals in a society. It's interesting how Japan's registration system choose different entities and different 'ACL rules' compared to, say, US common law. Seems like it'd be tricky to build a koseki-like registration here. Legal abstractions have a lot of inertia, and usually requires some sort of war or revolution to precipitate change. For example, most of Western Europe's legal systems are based on the Napoleonic code, spread by conquest, and was largely written after the French Revolution to sweep away the last vestiges of the monarchy and feudalism. Japan's modern koseki system was created right after the Meiji Restoration.
- grzm 10y ago
  Spitballing here: Could there be a way to set up some quasi-legal certification service that augments rather than replaces the existing system?
  - smallnamespace 10y ago
    Sure, the federal government could set something up, but I think the tricky part is getting all the individual states to adopt the system. Two things to note though: the Japanese registry system was originally set up so the government could keep track of its people, and given the level of anti-government paranoia in the US, I highly doubt that sort of change would get support. A majority of Americans don't even support a uniform ID card for all citizens, which almost every other country has.
    - grzm 10y ago
      Indeed, part 2 of the piece includes: > The national koseki system thus started as part-demographic information collection system, part-surveillance apparatus. > The current Japanese preoccupation with privacy may thus reflect recent historical experience of not actually having any.
    - Muromec 10y ago
      >Sure, the federal government could set something up, but I think the tricky part is getting all the individual states to adopt the system. It doesn't even need to be on federal level. Just think about it - koseki was designed mid-19 century and used paper records held by municipality. Churches in Europe kept paper books noting marriages, births and deaths even before that. The downsides are obvious: - in case of need you should go to same municipality and get extract from same book where event was recorded; - you only can make record in book of municipality where you are resident.

Aloha 10y ago

Does anyone have the link to the second part?

ivank 10y ago
http://www.japantimes.co.jp/community/2016/07/10/issues/japans-discriminatory-koseki-registry-system-looks-ever-outdated/ http://www.japantimes.co.jp/community/2016/07/10/issues/japa... via the author's RSS feed http://www.japantimes.co.jp/author/colin-pa-jones/feed/ http://www.japantimes.co.jp/author/colin-pa-jones/feed/
- grzm 10y ago
  Thanks for the link!

userbinator 10y ago

As a developer, the word that comes to mind for an analogy is "changelog".

kijin 10y ago

Official documents are marvelous. Once you have lived in a country where you can get official documents for pretty much anything you care to prove, it feels like going back to the stone age when you move to a country where you can't. Case in point: a Korean relative of mine was recently invited to join the board of an organization based in the UK. The UK org's bank wanted proof of address for the new board member, in the form of a notarized translation of a recent utility bill or credit card statement. In Korea, you can walk into any local government office and use a 24/7 self-serve kiosk to print out an official proof of your address. Not some random address like the Japanese koseki, but the actual address where you pay all your taxes and are registered to vote. You can even get it in English if you want. It comes with an official stamp and a cryptographic signature of its contents. But no, the UK bank won't take it. They want your fucking credit card statement. Ditto for marriage certificates, death certificates, driving and other licenses, public education, land ownership, car and boat ownership, tax returns... pretty much anything a person might need to prove in the course of their lives. Lost the original? No big deal. You can get a new one whenever you want, wherever you want. You can even get the government to prove your employment history for you, if you're worried that your last employer might go bust and become unable to provide references. And I don't think this makes us any more of a surveillance state than other countries, because the government is supposed to retain official records of all these things anyway. It's just a matter of letting citizens export their own information in a convenient and reliable format.

grzm 10y ago
That does sound convenient. Are there safeguards in place for personal privacy? Can anyone look up information on anyone else?
- kijin 10y ago
  Most information is only available to the person whom it concerns, or close family members. Some information, such as land ownership, is publicly available. If you're printing out a document for the purpose of proving something specific to someone else, you can often request that irrelevant information (such as ID numbers) be redacted for privacy.

losteverything 10y ago

Stupid question. Do Japanese believe using the courts is a cultural nono? In the USA there are definitely two types. Those that sue and those that feel it is sleazy or wrong.

cm3 10y ago
I haven't been to Asia (yet), but I can say that in the "Western World" courts are overloaded with cases that should probably not go further than your local ombudsman which in itself is a very old concept found in millenia old civilizations, predating the court system as we know it. This is probably why courts in the US have quick processing of a group of independent, alleged criminal offenders. It's unfair to those accused of breaking the law as it is to the lawyers and maybe even the judge who has to decide in two minutes whether the accused should go to jail/prison while the case is progressing. I'm afraid to suggest fixing the latter, because law enforcement organizations would likely push for legislation to make it quicker and easier to put people in real prison without a hearing or trial.

Muromec 10y ago

It's pretty much same in ex-USSR countries. Even if you get divorce papers in court, you would still need to go with them to registry office and that's where divorce would really happen. The downside is, that sometimes you would need to go to that exact registry office where your marriage was registered, name changed or your child born and it can be thousands of kilometers away from where you live now.

StephenAmar 10y ago

Isn't this system similar to the one we have in France (and other parts of Europe: Livret de Famille. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Family_register https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Family_register

ekianjo 10y ago
Yeah i think its about the same thing.
Aaargh20318 10y ago
It sound exactly like the 'burgerlijke stand' (civil status) we have in the Netherlands.
javiermaestro 10y ago
Yeah, exactly like in Spain, where all these things are done in the Civil Registry (Registro Civil). I mean, the article is like a huge WTF... somebody needs to travel / read about other countries, etc...
dirtyaura 10y ago
Yes, I think most of the developed world has something like a citizen register/family register. I think it is the Anglo-American culture that is the interesting diversion from the norm. For some historical reason, they have aversion to id numbers and central registers.
- atemerev 10y ago
  And yet, they can't help it, hence NSA. I doubt that anywhere in continental Europe there is a full-scale surveillance program like administered by NSA or GCHQ (or maybe we are unusually good at keeping secrets -- really doubt it, though).
  - Muromec 10y ago
    >And yet, they can't help it, hence NSA. I doubt that anywhere in continental Europe there is a full-scale surveillance program like administered by NSA or GCHQ Just reminder that KGB is still a thing and they have SORM: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SORM https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SORM

adrianratnapala 10y ago

From reading the article, I see three aspects: * Koseki as a data structure: It seems to be an event-log from which you can get an official certificate (extract) relfecting the current state. This is better than a systems where you work with loose records of the events themselves. Other countries should do the same thing. * Koseki as a rigid record of official categories: Soft cultural issues are important here. Koseki happens to force people to change their name upon marriage, but makes official gender-change easy. The Japanese shrug at both aspects. But English-speaking polities would not shrug, because they have an expectation that legal categories reflect these personal preferences [1]. This is a cultural thing that no data structure will fix. * Koseki as an alternative to the courts: As long as people will get upset about the categories, and as long as people are allowed to have their legal say, these things will end up in court. [1] For example, in the UK a "civil partnership" was a marriage-by-another-name arrangment for gay couples (before full marriage was extended to them in 2013). This resulted in complaints from heterosexual couples who wanted to get civil partnerships too.

Muromec 10y ago
> Other countries should do the same thing. Where other countries means "US", where everybody is paranoid and doesn't want government to have any kind of database on people. In Ukraine we have this level of crazy people who refuse to obtain personal tax number citing religious beliefs (something-something chipization, devil numbers) that for some reason are promoted by Moscow Church, but not by local one.
- cm3 10y ago
  Curious, is it possible that the restrictive Soviet rule (beginning with Josef and ending with the death of Brezhnev or, if you will, Gorbachev's glasnost+peretroika) caused this, or does it go much further back to Zarist times? What's the underlying explanation?
  - Muromec 10y ago
    Explanation for what exactly? To have your civil acts written in book kept by government - it's definitely not soviet invention, before USSR it was kept by church at least since 18th century.

Aaargh20318 10y ago

Seems like another article where Americans finding out how the rest of the world doesn't use the same retarded systems as they do. What's next, an article about this marvelous invention called 'the metric system' that is used in Bolivia ?

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_pferreir_ 10y ago
Exactly my thought. Every European country I've lived in works in pretty much the same way. Of course saying it comes from Japan makes it look more sophisticated ;)
- eloisant 10y ago
  Actually no, the koseki system or similar can be found in other Asian countries like South Korea but not in Europe. In France you can get a birth certificate, a marriage certificate, and you have a "livret de famille" that regroups all these information but that's a document that you own, not the administration. There is no registry that regroups all the information about a given family. Also note that in Japan, a women getting married will be transferred from her parents' koseki to her husband's koseki. There is no such thing in Europe.
  - kalleboo 10y ago
    European countries don't have a family-centered system like the Koseki (or Chinese Hukou; Wikipedia says South Korea abolished their system a decade ago) where a document represents a family. But several of them do have a population register (which is individual-centered, but with references up and down in the family tree). In Sweden you don't get birth or marriage certificates. If you want to prove your birth or marriage, you get your population registry extract which shows that you are registered as existing (proves birth) or married. So they're the same in that they are based on current state rather than collecting event documents. But they're different in that one represents families, whereas the other represents individuals. Japan also has a separate residency register. While the koseki shows who is in a family (birth/parents, marriage/children), the residency register shows where you live now/before (and is used for taxation). European countries with a population register simply use the same registry for both purposes.

ctphipps 10y ago

Nice as this all seems, the process for accessing the information in one's koseki is amazingly primitive. Most times that you need to do something official in Japan as a Japanese citizen, a copy of your koseki is required. Open a bank account and you'll need one. Apply for a passport and you'll need one etc. You'll not only need an original hard copy transcript of your koseki (tōhon/short-form or shōhon/long-form), but it will need to be dated within the last 3 months. How do you get one? Online? No. Got to visit your city/village/ward office. Any local city/village/ward office? No, it's got to be within the district where your koseki is held. OK, let's take a trip back to our hometown in the evening - surely there's a 24 hour kiosk in the lobby where I can print one out? No. Come during business hours, fill out a paper form requesting a transcript, take a number, wait in line to submit the request form. Go over what you wrote in the request form with an extremely nice and polite bureaucrat. Take another number to wait in line to pay about US$1.50 for the hard copy. Then a final number to pick up the hard copy. Wow. Why's this so hard? Well, although the contents of the koseki are of course computerized, these records are held at the ward/village/city office level and not nationally. Sure, the police, immigration authorities and others likely have a way to access each ward office's system, but as a citizen you have to physically trudge down to the office in the region where your koseki is held and request a copy. Not so bad if you're living near your family (since your koseki is typically kept at the ancestral home of your family, not necessarily where you live day-to-day), but if you've moved across Japan or internationally, you're screwed. Hope you have a family member you can deputise to go get one for you or that you have a good number of frequent flyer points to burn. The article seems to say it's pretty straight forward from overseas at any Japanese consulate. Well, not so much. Strangely enough, write access from overseas is pretty easy. Read access from overseas doesn't exist. Case in point - my wife and I recently had a baby born in the Bay Area who is eligible for Japanese citizenship. No problems, we head to the consulate and fill out the paperwork, provide all the birth proof documents and pay a small fee. The consulate sends the birth details to the city/village/ward office where our koseki is held and that ward office adds our baby to it a week or two later. Now, we need a passport. Can we just ask the consulate to authenticate our baby since they just added him to our koseki? Nope. We have to fly to Japan to visit the city/ward office where our koseki is held, or deputize a family member in Japan to do so for us, obtain a hard-copy of the updated koseki, have it posted to us in California and we then bring it into the consulate to prove our baby's citizenship - citizenship that they themselves just authenticated a few weeks ago. Wow. On top of that, there's no way of knowing when our baby has been added, so we just need to ask our family members to go down once a week for the next few weeks, request and pay for a copy and when our son appears, claim success. So yes, it's a great system, but it's so very paper and physical presence based that it hurts. Surprisingly enough, especially for Japan, foreigners have it easier. Since foreign residents are not on a koseki (well, they are in the case that they're married to a Japanese citizen but only in the "comments" section of the koseki, not the actual core of it and that's a whole 'nother story), none of this paperwork is required when foreigners want to deal with the Japanese bureaucracy. Instead, foreigners are required to carry a plastic ID card (called a "Zairyu card" in its latest permutation) and this has all the necessary information. No 3 month expiry, no ward office visit. So, there's at least one area that non-Japanese have it easier in Japan that citizens!

jmvbxx 10y ago

This is really nothing special at all. Latin American countries based on Spanish Civil Law have the same system (registro civil). As do countries of French origin and even the province of Quebec.

the_mitsuhiko 10y ago

Austria has the same basically. The interior ministry runs a few central registries for these things. You have a unique number hat follows you around and your records are linked through it. It's very convenient. Not only does it simolify tings, it also has some other advantages. For instance becayse your car license olate is through that system linked to your home adress that automatically updates people with Austrian licdnse placea typically do not get clamped.

known 10y ago

Koseki is the root of Burakumin http://www.economist.com/blogs/lexington/2009/09/farewell_to_feer.cfm http://www.economist.com/blogs/lexington/2009/09/farewell_to...

_nalply 10y ago

Swiss here. We have a small red booklet called «Familienbüchlein».

antirez 10y ago

Italy has the same, called "anagrafe", you need to update the registry every time you move to another city or even if you change street, since the registry not only tracks the relationships between individuals but the historical movements of single persons, and is also used in order to make you pay taxes about producing trash. Similarly when a child is born, the first thing to do for the parents is to go to the office and register the newborn, with the ability to recognize it, or not, for both the father and mother, as your child. That is, the mother can pretend that the child she just gave birth is not her, legally, if she is not ready to have a family, and this is considered by Italians a fundamental right of women, even if it is rarely used. It's a bit annoying to deal with this registry normally but it's an useful thing.

robryk 10y ago
Interesting case: Poland has an address register that is slowly being deprecated -- it is no longer necessary to ever update it and in increasingly fewer situations a record from that registry is required (and it would be very unpopular if people actually had to report to the government that they've moved). I wonder what are trends related to such registers in other countries.
- antirez 10y ago
  It is unlikely that it gets deprecated here. It's used for too many things. For instance one part of the free healthcare you get is a local doctor usually a few blocks from where you live where you can go for basic needs. This is also assigned based on your current address.
  - robryk 10y ago
    This also used to be the case in Poland. Now you can choose the GP you go to and change that decision IIRC twice a year. Choosing a doctor that's far away makes no sense, so there's no or little reason to restrict that choice to close doctors.
    - 10y ago

po 10y ago

It is still impossible for couples to register a marriage without one legally assuming the other’s surname, an antediluvian restriction that was nonetheless found constitutional by the Supreme Court last year. Interestingly, a workaround for this is to marry a foreigner. Japanese who marry non-japanese citizens don't need to switch their surnames. As a data format, koseki are interesting because they are tied up with citizenship in a weird way. [1] The spouse variable only holds values of type citizen so people who marry foreigners have their spouse listed in the free-form description section. :-) This has some drawbacks but in the case of having different surnames it gets you around the restriction. [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koseki#Koseki_and_citizenship https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koseki#Koseki_and_citizenship

dschuetz 10y ago

There are two ways handling registration processes. One way is to develop a registration system as little as possible, but then hoping not to deal with the papers later, because of the mess made in the process. Or, you develop a system thoroughly in the first place so that you don't have to deal much with the papers later, because the system was developed to avoid mess. Why patch fundamentally broken systems anyway? Why develop an interdependent system for personal data? There are different questions which reflect exactly the philosophy of eastern and western bureaucracy.

JackFr 10y ago

The real weirdness in the US vs the rest of the world is not that you have to get a court to issue a divorce or that there isn't a central registry, but rather there are literally fifty separate systems, all with slight variations, and you're not locked into a particular one. Divorces used to easier to obtain in Nevada, so people would go there. Certain states adopted same sex marriage before others, so you'd go there.

ardacinar 10y ago

There are a lot of examples here, here's one more; In Turkey, there has been a sort of central family-record keeping thingy for ages. It's centrally held, you don't need to go to your hometown to get one, but you had to go to a government office in your district of residence(you still need to, if you want an official hard-copy) (some records are, like place of residence, are kept locally though(. There was a project to computerize all of the process, mernis, it started in the early 90s and finished sometime around 2007. Since then, for most official businesses, you don't need the official document, just your ID card will do (or for emergencies, just the ID number printed on your ID card). The real odd thing about this system is, for non-usual stuff, you actually need to go to court and sue the government agency for the change. Filing for a divorce? You need to sue NVI for that. Changing your official name? Sue them. Sex change? Not sure about that, but probably yes. Disadvantage to that is having all the state records kept centrally, and knowing how Turkey works, probably under very lax security. In fact, the entire database(at least a copy of it made for the 2009 elections) got leaked earlier this year.

PaulRobinson 10y ago

Basically then, event sourced rather than OO CRUD. Not surprisingly, it makes things easier when distributed, just like in micro-service architectures. I like this a lot. England's Common Law system was created as a means for the powerful to remain powerful, not because it made any sense.

jacques_chester 10y ago
> England's Common Law system was created as a means for the powerful to remain powerful, not because it made any sense. The history of the Common Law and Equity is substantially more complex than you are making out.

ghaff 10y ago

I gather that it may vary by state, but in some places in the US it's apparently not even required to register births--which can cause problems for the children involved later on: http://www.radiolab.org/story/invisible-girl/ http://www.radiolab.org/story/invisible-girl/

mcguire 10y ago

One question: who keeps the records? In the US, there is a certain history of suspiciously convenient courthouse fires destroying property records. And then there are accidental fires---my mother late in life could not attend college classes because her high school had burned in the '50s and she had no way of providing she graduated. (I suppose there would be ways around the issue, but she didn't want to bother and thought it was funny.) Anyway, seems like a good way to completely erase someone's existence.

ghaff 10y ago
I'm sure it's far less true than it used to be but historically, yes, a lot of US records existed only in paper form in some school or courthouse or town hall where they were subject to being lost in a fire, natural disaster, or just carelessness. Certainly it's been a plot point in many a book or movie where someone assumes an identity chosen because records concerning a person had been lost in some manner. Based on stories I've head over the years, it can actually be quite challenging to get a passport if you can't lay your hands on your birth certificate or if that birth certificate doesn't match up with you because of some mistake or whatever.

jacques_chester 10y ago

This is analogous to the Torrens system of land registration (called a "land registry" in the article), pioneered in South Australia in the mid 1800s. It has almost totally replaced Common Law title everywhere that the Common Law operates. Prior to Torrens, land ownership was under Common Law. You owned land by buying a title or deed from the previous owner, who had bought from someone else, and so on. If the chain was broken, you ran the risk that some day, someone would show up with an unbroken chain that ran back further than yours. Naturally this created an ocean of bitter legislation, often populated by jaunty fleets of fraudulent documents. The Torrens system essentially says: unless it's in the government register, no land ownership or change of ownership is valid. You can sign anything you like, say anything you like, join pinkies and make a pinky promise. Until you update the register, it doesn't matter. It's a simple and effective system. Given that enforcing the law of property is one of the fundamental purposes of governments, it makes sense that they would simplify enforcement for themselves and their citizens. Of course, IANAL, TINLA.

Grue3 10y ago

Also very useful to discriminate against undesirable strata of society. [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burakumin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burakumin Isn't Big Government great?

joshuaheard 10y ago

Great idea. It is similar to the system we have in the U.S. for property records, but for people.