Japan in an Uproar as 'Big Brother' Computer File Kicks In
Japan put into operation a national computerized registry of its citizens today, provoking two un-Japanese responses: civil disobedience and a widespread feeling that privacy should take priority over efficiency.

Yokohama, Japan's second largest city, made the national government's registry voluntary, and half a dozen other cities refused to be included in the computerized system connecting local registries, effectively leaving four million people out of the system.

But a much larger mass of angry public opinion was behind this visible resistance. Critics noted that the government had labored for three years to produce the system on time, but had been unable to produce a privacy law that was to accompany it.

In a survey of 1,948 people conducted two weeks ago by the newspaper Asahi Shimbun, 86 percent of respondents said they were concerned about misuse or leakage of information, and 76 percent said the posting of the database should be postponed.

At a "disconnecting ceremony" this morning, Nobuo Hoshino, mayor of Kokubunji, one of the cities that refused to take part, said to television cameras, "Residents are sending us their views by e-mail, fax and various other ways, and almost all of them support us."

Under the system, all citizens, from babies in hospital nurseries to elderly in nursing homes, have been assigned individual 11-digit numbers. For now, the number allows retrieval of only basic information: name, address, sex and birth date.

The information is only to be available to government employees for official use, and is not on the Internet. Furthermore, all the information and more is already in government hands, in the creaking 19th-century era "koseki" or paper registry, which is scattered around city halls across this nation of 126 million people. The new system is intended to cut red tape and to make it easier for citizens as well as officials — by registering a change of address in only one place, for example.

But the government's zeal in creating the system was not matched by its zeal for pursuing a personal information protection bill, which died last week as Parliament ended its summer session.
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/08/06/international/asia/06JAPA.html