Japan "Difficult Personal Name Kanji Blocking E-Government Removed from Computer System"...Resident Backlash

700,000 Hanja Characters for Personal Names... Font Corruption
"Delete All but 10%"... Resident Lawsuit

The Japanese government, which announced plans to build an integrated e-government system, is struggling with the use of personal name kanji characters, considered the biggest obstacle to computerization. With over 700,000 personal name kanji registered in family registers, many of which are not supported by fonts on computers or smartphones, the government is facing difficulties in digitization.

In response, the Japanese government declared that it would delete all kanji characters from the system except for the 70,000 that can be computerized, but residents opposing this have filed lawsuits, leading to strong backlash.

A graph showing the number of Hanja characters supported by each operating system, using examples of '가 변' Hanja characters. Various variant Hanja characters are displayed. (Photo by Munja Information Technology Promotion Council)

On the 5th, Mainichi Shimbun reported that the Kishida Fumio administration’s government standardization reform is facing difficulties due to personal name kanji. The Kishida government announced plans to standardize 20 information systems, including family registers, resident basic registers (certificates), and national pension systems by 2025. The aim is to maintain the quality of administrative services by digitalizing systems amid difficulties in securing public officials due to population decline.

According to the Japanese Ministry of Justice, there are currently 700,000 personal name kanji registered in family registers, overwhelmingly more than South Korea’s 8,000 characters. This means that registering names alone takes an enormous amount of time.

Japan has been using the simplified "Shinjitai" characters, which reduce the number of strokes of the original complex kanji, since 1949, but many names still use characters from before the Shinjitai reform. For example, the kanji used in the Japanese surname "Watanabe (渡?)" originally was "邊." There are many cases in family registers where the original form of such kanji has been slightly modified. Even if pronounced the same as Watanabe, numerous variants of the "ga hen (radical)" kanji series are registered in family registers.

Furthermore, since family registers were handwritten on paper in the past, there are many independently modified characters, such as adding dots to distinguish between the main family and branch families, as well as typos.

Various registered Hanja notations of the Japanese surname 'Saito'. (Photo by Window Forest)

The problem is that each local government supports different systems. Some local governments can use certain characters, but others cannot support them, causing characters to break and making system linkage impossible. Only about 10,000 kanji characters can be properly displayed on smartphones, and many personal name kanji are not supported at all on smartphones or PCs. Mainichi pointed out that "personal name kanji are encouraging Galapagosization." "Galapagosization" refers to Japan’s tendency to cling to existing systems and become isolated by failing to align with global standards.

To solve this, the Japanese government analyzed the 700,000 characters and narrowed them down to about 70,000 by considering characters with minor differences as the same. In March last year, they distributed these as "Administrative Standard Characters" to local governments nationwide and planned to make their use mandatory during the integrated e-government process.

However, resident opposition quickly followed. There have been cases where residents filed lawsuits against name changes made by local governments and regained their original personal name kanji. Even in the 1990s, when the government first promoted this, conservative lawmakers urged not to change personal name kanji, saying, "Personal name kanji contain family history and thoughts, as well as the intentions of parents." Therefore, administrative changes can only be made with citizens’ permission.

The Civil Affairs Bureau of the Ministry of Justice told Mainichi that the reason personal name kanji have not been continuously changed to standard characters is "because it is difficult to respond in detail according to each individual’s wishes." They added, "We plan to proceed with work while monitoring the timing when the standard characters can be accepted."

The Digital Agency of Japan currently promotes the vision of "digitalization that is friendly to people, leaving no one behind." Professor Sasahara Hiroyuki, a linguist at Waseda University, said, "Characters are public goods as well as belonging to users. It is inevitable that individuals are attached to even slight differences in their names. While pursuing efficiency, it is essential to have measures that the individuals can accept."

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.