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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...