I got a My Number Card in 2019 in preparation for the October launch of the Cashless Rebate program. In retrospect it’s unfortunate that the Japanese government program did run the program until they achieved a cashless user base target instead of ending it with an arbitrary time limit, the Japanese economy would have benefited as it slid into the COVID recession. Anyway, I got the extra My Number cashless rebate points. But outside of that, my My Number Card has been a complete bust.
Online banking for example, has changed a lot for Japanese customers these past few years. Banking apps are increasingly using My Number Card for identity authentication for online account creation and ID authentication use via NFC will rapidly increase with new Japanese government guidelines that require NFC verification over visual checks as the latter is highly susceptible to counterfeit ID use. NFC verification use will also increase with launch of My Number Digital ID for Apple Wallet in the iOS 18.4 update coming this April.
Unfortunately, American citizens living in Japan will never experience the convenience of creating an online Japanese bank account thanks to the Obama Administration created Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (FATCA) rules. Forget online setup, hello complications because American citizens have the addition paperwork of registering their Social Security number when opening any Japanese bank account who are legally required to report US citizens to USA authorities. US banking laws require any transfer amount 3,000 USD and over to be duly recorded and reported to the US government, assume the same for American citizens using Japanese banks, a legacy of the spy obsessed Obama era.
But that’s nothing compared to the much larger potential problem for any foreigner living in Japan with a middle name on their passport. Japanese naming conventions do not have middle names and neither do the vast data processing engines of Japanese society, from city halls to banks to tax offices. All paperwork, paper and digital, does not have a middle name field, and more importantly, neither do the databases. Because middle names do not exist in the family name / first name document world, there is no standard way for data systems to deal with the information. This is a problem because Japanese immigrations, who are responsible for issuing a Residence Card to anybody staying over 3 months, follow passport protocols putting the middle name on the Residence Card in this order: family name, first name, middle name. The Residence Card name in turn is the template for all other official Japanese government documentation: drivers license, health insurance, My Number, and so on.
So where does the middle name go when applying for a bank account or a mobile phone account? It depends. Most paperwork or online application forms simply follow the Residence Card condensing the first name + middle name into the first name field. Sometimes it fits, sometimes it doesn’t depending on the name field character limit.
Take MUFJ for example. The bank account has my last-first-middle name configuration. My MUFJ NICOS credit card has standard first-last name configuration but the online app for managing the card requires setting up an online account that only takes, you guessed it, last-first name in both romaji and katakana configurations. The NICOS app cannot resolve the discrepancy between the MUJF account with my middle name and the NICOS card account information which does not and refuses to complete the process. Long story short, I can’t use the app.
The docomo apps have a similar problem, when using My Number card to verify my identity, the docomo app reads the last-first-middle My Number configuration but asks me to enter a last-first katakana name configuration that, of course do not match. Verification fails and My Number card goes back in my physical wallet where it stays until the next failed attempt. I don’t think I’ve had a successful verification yet. And so it goes. I asked the local ward office My Number desk if there is anything I can do but it’s all up to the apps and how they resolve the different information bits, which seems to be all over the place.
So yes, I will load My Number Digital ID into Apple Wallet when it becomes available sometime after the iOS 18.4 update goes live. But I suspect the digital version will suffer the same fate of the physical card and collect virtual dust in my iPhone.
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