The government’s scheme to get everyone in Japan, Japanese national and foreign resident alike, to apply for a My Number card has been plagued by problems. The aim of the My Number system is to assign a unique number to every person in Japan that the government can use for all national bureaucratic functions, much like the U.S. social security number, and the cards will be digital instruments that can connect to these functions. Though there had been a certain level of resistance to the scheme owing to citizens’ mistrust of the way the government handles personal data, a majority of people have signed up, many after the government started rewarding points for doing so that could be used for limited purchases. But as it happened, the original fear was realized: Many of the problems with the actual usage of the cards are related to the inadvertent leaking of personal information to the wrong people, though the number of actual cases has been low.

The one problem that has been enormous, however, has to do with bank accounts that were linked digitally to My Number cards. Almost 55 million people registered their bank accounts with their My Number cards, and about 130,000 of these were registered to the wrong bank accounts, but not because of a glitch in the system or mistakes by government functionaries. In almost all the cases, the bank accounts were registered to a parent of the card-holder, not the card-holder themself. According to the rules, the bank account registered for a specific card must be in the name of the card-holder, because it will be used by the government to deposit funds—tax refunds, government handouts, etc.—to the card-holder as an individual. According to an editorial in the Japan Times, “Digital Minister Taro Kono has called on persons who have linked their accounts to those of their children…to change the registration by the end of September, noting that payments will not be made to bank accounts of people other than registered recipients.”

If you are like me, this particular problem is confusing, since it not only presupposes that a child of any age is expected to apply for their own My Number card, but that they are also expected to have their own individual bank account. Of course, children can have bank accounts set up for them by their parents or guardians, as is often the case, but under what circumstances would the government transfer funds to these accounts? Minors don’t file tax returns and government handouts usually go to households, not individuals. Most likely, the parents who registered their children for My Number cards did so to take advantage of the reward points offered to promote the system, since making an application would earn the applicant 20,000 points. But while these points can be used to purchase goods and services from participating retailers and local business groups, they are not cash, and thus cannot be deposited into a bank account. Another aspect of this problem is the effectiveness of making a My Number card for a child. Even infants can apply for a card since they are assigned numbers, but if you have one you know that not only do you have to create a password to use the card, but that it contains a photo of the holder and also seems to require a signature. In principle, the cards are renewed once every ten years, but apparently the renewal period is much shorter for a child, which makes sense with regard to the photo but also sounds like a pain in the neck.

Perhaps this is over-thinking the matter, but in any case I have not found any mention in the media of the bank account problem that includes an explanation of how children can apply and use My Number cards. However, I have found an explanation of something else that I find intriguing. On June 8, the Asahi Shimbun ran an interview with Chuo University professor Hiroshi Miyashita about the bank account problem. Miyashita says that the practical problem with having a child’s My Number card linked to a parent’s bank account is that it would “delay” any government payments to which the child is entitled. However, rather than demonstrating the parent’s lack of understanding as to the function of the My Number card system, he says that what this problem shows is that the Digital Agency that oversees the rollout of the system does not understand the “philosophy” behind the system. This misunderstanding is proven by the scale of the problem—130,000 “mistakes” that can’t be ignored, and the root of the problem is that the My Number system is a means of tracking individuals, which represents a major “shift” in how the government addresses the population. Presently, the focus is on families as the most irreducible social unit, but the My Number system aims to make the individual the primary recipient of government attention. 

The reason so many children’s cards were linked to their parents’ bank accounts is that people have been conditioned to think that minors are dependent on their guardians, which is true but not pertinent to the My Number system. So, according to Miyashita, the government, or, more specifically, the Digital Agency, should have clarified this point while promoting applications for everyone—and that means everyone. Obviously, he says, the agency didn’t even think of this being a problem when they designed the system. They should have nipped it in the bud when the Tax Agency discovered the bank account problem in February and brought it to the attention of the Digital Agency. But because Kono was stressing the speed of the rollout the agency couldn’t keep up with all the mistakes being made with regard to bank accounts. 

Miyashita says this disconnect between the real purpose of the My Number card system and business-as-usual when it comes to transactions between the authorities and the public is also the source of the personal data leak problems, and such problems will continue to occur as long as Kono “keeps his foot on the accelerator.” Applying for a card is still optional, but the Digital Agency has also decided that people will have to have one if they want to access their national health insurance, including infants. Obviously, the people in charge at the agency are racing ahead without actually thinking of the consequences.

But what really interests me about Miyashita’s views—a point he doesn’t talk about himself—is how this “shift” toward individual identities, which he says is a natural condition of a “society that is changing all the time,” will affect other aspects of government control. At present, this control is based on the idea that the family is the core social unit. When the My Number system is normalized and everyone is treated bureaucratically as an individual, what will it mean for the family registration system (koseki), birth reports, divorce proceedings, and all the other official functions that define a family as far as the authorities are concerned? Will married couples, who enter into their unions as individuals and remain that way afterwards in the eyes of the government, be able to keep their birth names instead of having to choose one spouse’s or the other’s? Will family registration documents be based on the person, as they are in South Korea, rather than on the nuclear family? Will LGBTQ people be able to marry as individuals who retain rights as individuals? The more conservative elements in power will try to find a way to have it both ways, but if, as Miyashita suggests, a change is going to come simply due to inertia, than maybe we should stop complaining about the My Number system and its chip-laden card and help it along as best we can.