TOKYO, Oct. 6, 2023—This is a story of the greed for a tiny amount of government handout in exchange of degradation of human dignity and ignorance of privacy security of the Japanese people who in the past were a proud populace for grace and nobility.
On Oct. 3, 2023, the Japanese government pounded the chest to announce that a total of 75.56 million people had applied for a cash voucher program in exchange for registering their personal information with the government called the ‘My Number’ card system. The program closed at the end of September. pays up to 20,000 yen ($130) in cash-in-kind points.
Including those who had earlier registered, the aggregate number of people who had registered for the system came to 92.99 million, or 73.9 percent of the total Japanese population of 125.7 million. The Japanese government budged 2 trillion yen ($13 billion) for this cash point incentive program in fiscal 2023.
That almost ¾ of the Japanese population signed into the system, particularly that as many as 60 percent were incentivized by the point program, requires in-depth analysis it pays a paltry 5,0000 to 20,000 yen ($33-130) in cash-in-kind points to be used for purchasing goods and services with the type of cards that need to be registered with the National Tax Agency, empowering the tax authority to strip-search taxpayers and its parent entity, the Ministry of Finance the most efficient tax collection policies at minimal cost.
It’s all the more enigmatic that the 75.56 percent or 60 percent of taxpayers that registered with the system came amid an explosion of news reports about government and private-sector system contractor malfeasance resulting in the issuing of My Number cards that bear strangers’ ID and personal information, giving cash-in-kind credit points to wrong persons, issuing of copies of Personal Seal (Inkan shomei) certificates that had been de-registered from the government registry, medical facilities’ refusal or inability to accept My Number cards as National Health Insurance (NHI) cards, among many.
Weren’t they concerned about their privacy and personal assets – the kinds of information that My Number cards eventually stores when the dust settles and enables the authorities including the Ministry of Finance to poke into – as well as the probability of hacking? The system’s servers managed by a Japanese contractor were located in South Korea when it was first launched a few years ago. That alone was a risk but the system was haunted by frequent privacy leaks. That had prompted an unknown number of Japanese to cancel their My Number cards but that number is believed to be relatively limited.
Were the 76.56 percent of the Japanese that registered really lured by the incentive program? Certainly many seemed to have been. Yet many others did so under pressure of small villager mentality, feeling coopted by pack mentality to do so by following their relatives, neighbors and friends who signed on to it.
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