Misplaced or incorrectly attributed data, erratic connections, erroneous information: the bugs of My Number follow one another and weaken a Japanese government struggling to respond. This electronic card system allows each Japanese or foreign resident to access a growing number of services, public or otherwise. Its generalization should make it possible to achieve the “digital society” ambitioned by the Prime Minister, Fumio Kishida, a challenge in a country still attached to paper, fax and even floppy disks.
The proliferation of problems and the inability of the authorities to correct them ended up affecting his popularity. Now only supported by 33% of Japanese, down from 44% at the end of May, according to a mid-June poll by the center-left daily Mainichi, Mr. Kishida had to set up a working group on June 21 to find solutions to the crisis. Present at the first meeting, he promised a complete overhaul of the system. “I hope that the whole government will do everything in its power to regain the public’s trust”, he pointed out. The Prime Minister has also given up on organizing early legislative elections for fear of a setback for his formation, the Liberal Democratic Party (PLD).
The matter is all the more serious as the Japanese remain suspicious of this system launched in January 2016. It was then a question of improving an administrative machine undermined by the scandal of pension contributions, which upset Japan in the late 2000s. In 1997, the government decided to assign each taxpayer a number. The Social Security Agency then embarked on a vast reconciliation operation to update the accounts of all residents.
However, ten years later, under pressure from elected members of the opposition, she had to publicly acknowledge that nearly 51 million contributions paid for pensions remained unallocated. Errors had been made when recording surnames – due to the complexity of transcriptions of kanji, Chinese ideograms forming names, which sometimes have several pronunciations, and years of birth. These revelations caused the fall of the first government of Shinzo Abe (2006-2007), then that of Yasuo Fukuda (2007-2008).
Reluctance of the population
The implementation of My Number was supposed to correct these faults, but the system never won the support of the population. Only 77.2% of taxpayers had applied for the My Number card on June 11. This share has recently increased because the Ministry of Public Management has promised any applicant purchase points worth 20,000 yen (127 euros). According to an online survey carried out in early 2023 by the Digital Agency, the first reluctance of the Japanese to ask for it is the “fear of a leak of information”.
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