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Comment by grzm | Hacker News Reader

Interesting. This in particular stood out to me:

  [T]he koseki ... is an integral part of Japanese family
  law that doesn’t actually care about families beyond
  ensuring that the legally significant aspects of them
  are identifiable to the Rest of the World. Thus, a
  koseki extract today will show a marriage, but not
  whether the spouses are living together. The system
  also doesn’t care (i.e., show) if the registered
  father is not the biological father. It doesn’t care
  whom the kids live with after a divorce or if a
  divorced parent is paying maintenance or how often
  (or if) he sees his children.

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Using the code tag for blockquoting puts mobile viewers in side scrolling hell. This is what I see: http://i.imgur.com/sQhfLlR.jpg.

Thanks for letting me know! Too late to update the original, so here's the text again:

> [T]he koseki ... is an integral part of Japanese family law that doesn’t actually care about families beyond ensuring that the legally significant aspects of them are identifiable to the Rest of the World. Thus, a koseki extract today will show a marriage, but not whether the spouses are living together. The system also doesn’t care (i.e., show) if the registered father is not the biological father. It doesn’t care whom the kids live with after a divorce or if a divorced parent is paying maintenance or how often (or if) he sees his children.

That interested me as well. Is there another system to record biological ancestry (potentially important for medical reasons), child custody (and who decides which gets custody in case of a conflict), and child support?

I mean, taking normal prose and putting it in a pre tag is kind of a silly practice. I know we're hackers here and everything but that's actually not a great way to display anything but what it's intended for.

Does HN even support a blockquote?

Legal systems define an abstract interface between individuals in a society. It's interesting how Japan's registration system choose different entities and different 'ACL rules' compared to, say, US common law.

Seems like it'd be tricky to build a koseki-like registration here. Legal abstractions have a lot of inertia, and usually requires some sort of war or revolution to precipitate change.

For example, most of Western Europe's legal systems are based on the Napoleonic code, spread by conquest, and was largely written after the French Revolution to sweep away the last vestiges of the monarchy and feudalism. Japan's modern koseki system was created right after the Meiji Restoration.

Spitballing here: Could there be a way to set up some quasi-legal certification service that augments rather than replaces the existing system?

Sure, the federal government could set something up, but I think the tricky part is getting all the individual states to adopt the system.

Two things to note though: the Japanese registry system was originally set up so the government could keep track of its people, and given the level of anti-government paranoia in the US, I highly doubt that sort of change would get support.

A majority of Americans don't even support a uniform ID card for all citizens, which almost every other country has.

Indeed, part 2 of the piece includes:

> The national koseki system thus started as part-demographic information collection system, part-surveillance apparatus.

> The current Japanese preoccupation with privacy may thus reflect recent historical experience of not actually having any.

>Sure, the federal government could set something up, but I think the tricky part is getting all the individual states to adopt the system.

It doesn't even need to be on federal level. Just think about it - koseki was designed mid-19 century and used paper records held by municipality. Churches in Europe kept paper books noting marriages, births and deaths even before that.

The downsides are obvious:

- in case of need you should go to same municipality and get extract from same book where event was recorded; - you only can make record in book of municipality where you are resident.

your last point does not appear to be true, the article says that the koseki is held somewhere, but doesn't care where you live.

Also possible in implementing such a system are a variety of accidents or abuses that may unfairly benefit or harm different groups. "Seeding" the central database from the existing patchwork of forms, licenses, decisions, databases and other records would be inherently messy and even a quasi-legal database could cause a bureaucratic nightmare once any process starts depending upon it.

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