TIL the government posts the home address of everyone who recieves Japanese nationality in their regular gazette. Is this not dangerous?

19 comments

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telephone_directory

2. I was shocked and horrified when our neighborhood association sent out a printed membership directory with all of our names, addresses and phone numbers.

   Some neighbors had their mobile numbers printed on the fucking booklet. Nobody told us that they would publish such a thing and didn’t ask for our permission to add our info to the directory.

3. That is outrageous and insane.

4. Lol this is 🤣😹

5. Oh dang… I’m in the process right now and have a Japanese following on YouTube and my first name is very unique so anyone on YouTube could figure out where I live even though I don’t say my last name. I have a toddler so this is terrifying….

6. I have reported them to Twitter, hope it helps.

7. Commenting to keep track. Curious what the reason is they have to do this.

8. The answer seems pretty straightforward to me:

   To become a Japanese national, a ruling/law must be passed, a law cannot be concealed or this wouldn’t be a law, hence your name is made public to settle the nationalisation.

   It is the exact same thing in France were names of « naturalized » are published in the « Journal Officiel ». It is for example used by genealogists decades later.

   I think it is really the same in all countries, but YMMV

9. Its right wing nutters/those given to stalking that are cause for concern.

   Privacy laws could do with tightening up. Overall, I still feel this is a safe country to be in, compared to … others.

10. The laws and regulations are made before the age of Internet. I think it’s comparable to US police force open up all the mugshots of suspects.

    Recently, a guy made a web site which scrape the 官報 for all the bankrupts and plot it on the map. It was eventually took down voluntary but it cast a serious question on the status quo. 官報 is meant be public information. The web site add nothing new to the information. It just visualize it.

    But I guess it won’t change in the near future.

11. Isn’t this what phone books are? Names, address, and phone numbers readily available to the public?

    I understand needing to be able to opt out, the government publishing information like this that can be used in hate crimes is something they need to consider, but it’s not unusual for this information to be known. It used to be quite common to be able to look this information up.

12. Honestly, who cares. Nobody is ever going to do anything with it. Yeah Japan is weird sometimes but until harm actually occurs, it’s a waste of energy to worry about the weird shit. Far worse stuff happens daily that we don’t bat an eyelid at.

13. Following

14. I am very interested to learn more about the DoJ response to your inquiry.

15. Please share any new information. My guess is, that the law requiring this was made 80 years ago where privacy was not a thing in Japan (still isn’t really) and they didn’t bother to change it even with changes of the information technology.

    Edit: The law is apparently from the Meij era, so well more than 100 years old

16. Forgive me for not following as English is not my first language. I live in Japan though and when OP said “in their regular gazette”, who are the recipients of this gazette? Is it nationwide or based on areas?

17. Hello. Naturalized Japanese here. The answers to your questions are as follows:

    * Yes. No. (explicitly required by law)
    * No. I personally have met, interviewed, corresponded or personally know over 300 people that have naturalized over 12 years, and nobody, not one, has ever brought this up. Of those 300, I’d say there are about 15 nationalities, and of those 300, I’d say about a half dozen could be considered “famous”, and about 30% are women.
    * No.

    Regarding the answer to #3, the law requiring the publication of this data was made in the 1950s, before the issue of PII and addresses were an issue. I should also note that one’s birthdate is also included, which might be an issue for identity theft.

    Also, the address published is the address at the time of naturalization, and the name published is your PRE naturalization name, rendered in non-romaji (kanji or kana).

    As about 90% of naturalized choose a new name when they become Japanese, a potential problem person would need to know your original pre-Japanese full legal name, how its rendered in Japanese, and you would have to have not moved to a new address.

    All that being said, I’m personally in favor of the law changing to deal with the new realities of PII, identity theft, stalking/harassment, that are a fact of life in the 21st century. (Remember that pre-Internet, you’d have to go to the Diet National Library to look up info in the 官報)

    Oh yeah, if you show up at MY home unannounced as a stranger, I will call the police, who have a police station less than 200m from me. ^_^

    I have much more detailed articles about this on the site “Becoming legally Japanese” but the killjoy mods at /r/japanlife ban and remove any posts with links to “self-promotion.”

    So go there and search for it if you want more detailed info.

18. Don’t they do this too if you are the representative director of a company as well?

19. Looked at the twitter account and he posted the kanpou pages from January 4.

    Def huge privacy issue imo. Good on you for contacting the printing bureau, and definitely alert MoJ about it.

    Edit:

    Some stuff I noticed reading the ones he posted: lots of Chinese characters that don’t exist in Japanese and aside from that all katakana. These are probably characters and katakanized names from the prev nationality. If you changed your name it wouldn’t be as terrible (still is ofc).

    Addresses are also only up to 号, not 号室, so until the block part (often times it is the building but not always, could also be room). If you live in an apartment with 号-号室 your room number won’t show up. If you have a house that means it’s there in its entirety.