Comment by adrianratnapala | Hacker News Reader

Comment by adrianratnapala | Hacker News Reader

adrianratnapala

From reading the article, I see three aspects:

* Koseki as a data structure: It seems to be an event-log from which you can get an official certificate (extract) relfecting the current state. This is better than a systems where you work with loose records of the events themselves. Other countries should do the same thing.

* Koseki as a rigid record of official categories: Soft cultural issues are important here. Koseki happens to force people to change their name upon marriage, but makes official gender-change easy. The Japanese shrug at both aspects.

But English-speaking polities would not shrug, because they have an expectation that legal categories reflect these personal preferences [1]. This is a cultural thing that no data structure will fix.

* Koseki as an alternative to the courts: As long as people will get upset about the categories, and as long as people are allowed to have their legal say, these things will end up in court.

[1] For example, in the UK a "civil partnership" was a marriage-by-another-name arrangment for gay couples (before full marriage was extended to them in 2013). This resulted in complaints from heterosexual couples who wanted to get civil partnerships too.

> Other countries should do the same thing.

Where other countries means "US", where everybody is paranoid and doesn't want government to have any kind of database on people.

In Ukraine we have this level of crazy people who refuse to obtain personal tax number citing religious beliefs (something-something chipization, devil numbers) that for some reason are promoted by Moscow Church, but not by local one.

Curious, is it possible that the restrictive Soviet rule (beginning with Josef and ending with the death of Brezhnev or, if you will, Gorbachev's glasnost+peretroika) caused this, or does it go much further back to Zarist times? What's the underlying explanation?

Explanation for what exactly? To have your civil acts written in book kept by government - it's definitely not soviet invention, before USSR it was kept by church at least since 18th century.

For the mentioned group's fears. It must be based in some defining event, no?

No. It's just cheaper to make identity fraud without centralized database.

You pay few thousands to regional officer in any district and they issue you a handwritten internal id book [0] with whatever name you want and there is no trace of it. If something happens they would claim that id form was fraudulent or stolen.

However, when you get tax number, it goes through central office and leaves paper trail and entry in some database that records such issuance.

[0] http://images.delcampe.com/img_large/auction/000/226/943/305...

> and doesn't want government to have any kind of database on people.

Yet you have to register to vote, and this registration allows you to optionally declare which political party your affiliated with.

...which is the complete opposite to Sweden. We have a system similar to the Koseki in the article, but it is expressly illegal for any part of government to make a registry of people's political opinions or sexual orientation, or a bunch of other sensitive characteristics. I even think race is one such category.

That last part is madness. You better believe as a citizen i‘d care about the ethnic religious and racial makeup statistics of my country.

I think you misunderstood. Sweden has a census, they just don't have a voter roll you can look up to see what race your neighbour is or what party they belong to.

It's important to know that government dealings in Sweden, and that includes databases, falls under the principle of publicity unless specifically exempt. That means government officials must make the information available to anyone who asks without delay or imposing a fee. (It's often a surprise to newcomers that information about earnings and taxes is public to anyone, but you get used to it being an equal right for all.) That's part of the reason policial and religious afflictions are forbidden to store.

> That last part is madness.

Europe has had a lot of bad experiences when it comes to how we've treated our minorities, and the census has often been used as a tool for finding "undesirables". And I'm not only talking about countries like Germany here; Sweden had a policy of forced sterilisation for reasons of "racial hygiene", that it didn't discontinue until 1975.

http://www.temple.edu/tempress/titles/1625_reg.html

Why it is madness?

The color of skin is no more relevant to anything than color of hair. You can know the percentage of, say, red-haired people in your country, but what for? The only thing where that could be needed is to fight e.g. some Dark Ages prejudices against red-haired people, and this is expected to be a marginal issue, not some all-encompassing national program.

The same goes for religion. In Europe, religion is inherently private endeavour.

The colour of skin is relevant in the case of racially motivated crimes. Not recording this just leads to a society which pushes racism under the rug.

There are, of course, race-motivated crimes, as well as, say, anti-Semitism. However, if some newspaper suddenly started publishing something along the lines of "in northern Paris, there are now more than 4.8% Jewish residents, an increase of 0.3% compared to the last year", the Jews would be offended, and rightfully so (perhaps not so much in the US, but definitely in Europe).

There is no need for public knowledge for racial or "country of origin" statistics. There is no need to specifically hide or distort this information, of course, but it is of interest only for law enforcers. Anybody else who asks for it usually have questionable motivations.

Why?

Yes, you can collect racial statistics, but the thing that is expressly prohibited is to make a registry where you connect a person with these attributes.

The idea is that it should be impossible to, for example, get a list of all the communists in an area, or all the homosexuals, or all the moslems, or everyone of African descent.

It's a defense of minorities against a future fascist government. Which I think is kind of neat.

As far as I can tell, this anti-government paranoia in the US is just an internet bogeyman. It doesn't seem to stop the elite from doing anything, whether good or bad. It certainy hasn't prevented the US from compiling databases about its citizens.

Japan is the first country I've heard of that records family info in this way. But Australian states do have central land registries, these are maps which have the final say own who owns what.

In the US this system is rare, and the resistance has not come from Tea Partyers. Rather from the industry of title-insurers who benefit from the unceratin property rights created by the title-deed system.

By European standards it's good old corruption, but in US it's suddenly an "industry".

Whenever we have problem here, first mentioned solution would be Single National Registry of Whatever.

VAT returns fraud - make registry of all refunds. VAT evasion - log all VAT transaction in tax office database. Land disputes and corruption - make a map with all registered land plots and their owners and make it open. Voter suppression and voting fraud - make voter registry, have it always up to date and let voters check if they are on list online.

Corrupt officials - make open registry of tax declarations of all officials, MPs and their family members. Property and corporate ownership fraud - make registries of companies and properties and make it open.

Passports take longer than 30 days to issue - registry of all citizens, residents and everybody who entered country. And the first thing you do, if you are foreigner or citizen, you get tax number and keep that ugly piece of paper with you. Without tax number you don't even exists.

> Koseki happens to force people to change their name upon marriage, but makes official gender-change easy. The Japanese shrug at both aspects.

I'm not sure that's fair. People have gone to court in Japan in the hopes of not having to change their name.

The legal database structure reflecting cultural norms thing is quite interesting. Reminded me of https://qntm.org/gay

Sweden didn't have any problems with "y2gay", noone from the tax authority complained about massive changes there.

However, the whole transsexual/intersex phenomenon is causing more issues. Basically, gender is encoded in your ID number, and stored in the census database, so people who change gender won't get a new ID number, so there will be a discrepancy between their number and the (correct) database value, but some systems don't bother checking the database, they just infer it from the number, and choke when the gender is "wrong" for something, usually systems around registering parents.

I think the long-term solution will be to just stop registering the gender of people, and not make any system care about it anymore, thereby reflecting the current cultural norm. :-)

>Basically, gender is encoded in your ID number, and stored in the census database, so people who change gender won't get a new ID number, so there will be a discrepancy between their number and the (correct) database value

You do, in fact, get a new personal identification number when undergoing gender reassignment surgery.

Oh you do? I thought that would create far more hassle than it was worth. I stand corrected!

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