Companies that help people vanish
bbc.com
bbc.com
Are they changing their names and starting over entirely?
Or are they just moving and the company helps them establish themselves in a way where their name isn't likely to appear as easily and Japan has some mix of legal / personal norms that allow this to happen / them to remain hidden?
In the US, I imagine you'd file a missing persons report, and track down people still using their banking connections. If you wanted to disappear in the US and not be tracked, you'd need to keep a lot of cash, and not use a car (or not register it).
or buy someone else's car registered under an LLC and you purchased their LLC, the state isn't aware that the car changed titles
Its state dependent on whether the state you are physically in has the resources to enforce foreign LLC registration (hint: none do, with California being a big maybe)
Its state dependent on whether enforcement has any real consequences, such as whether there is any retroactive punishment or not (example: New York State actually gives retroactive protections for your foreign LLC even after you are sued in court and form a domestic LLC as required to have a better case, so the only consequence there is having to register once you get sued which costs a little money, no consequence for the property and this doesn't address a bill of sale for a car)
So, what happens when you get pulled over? Shrug, have all the papers? Point is that you can transfer any property this way by transferring the business that owns it with nobody knowing what the business actually owns.
People get pulled over driving company cars all the time. That's exactly what this is.
Been pulled over a few times (tail light, missing front plates, etc). Never a problem.
Helps to pick a company name that is boringly generic yet obviously conveys that "this company's purpose is to own vehicles".
Its nice to be in an audience where others do it as well. But I think that's the point, you shouldn't know who does it if its designed well. Your name wouldn't be on any public records. And you can always just ambiguously say "my CPA/lawyer said to set it up that way I don't know anything" as opposed to coming across as a meticulous chess player in life.
Yes.
> Do you use the LLC for anything else?
No.
I've been living in Japan since 1983, and my impression is that companies and government agencies became more careful about customers' and citizens' privacy about 15 years ago, after a privacy-protection law took effect [1; see also 2]. Since then, when I have done something like buy a new cellphone or pay taxes, the company or agency has had to go through an extra step or two to demonstrate to me that they would use my personal information only for the stated purpose. Television and newspapers started obscuring faces, license plates, etc. in photographs more often as well [examples at 3 and 4]. I teach at a public university, and we're now supposed to encrypt all information we have about students' grades, e-mail addresses, etc.
I don't know how effective these laws and rules are in general, but they probably do make it harder to find someone who wants to disappear. The brother of someone I know did just that a few years ago. He went through some kind of midlife crisis and left his wife, children, and family business without a word. She tried to trace him through the police, but the police wouldn't cooperate because there was no sign of foul play. He was spotted by a relative a year or so later living in an apartment not too far away and has since moved back with his family.
[0] https://www.generalunion.org/laws-and-rights/1490-a-guide-to...
[1] http://www.japaneselawtranslation.go.jp/law/detail_main?id=1...
[2] https://www.ppc.go.jp/en/index.html
[3] https://news.yahoo.co.jp/articles/b4383067ba5e14089768a47f38...
What possible middle life crisis can make people detach themselves from their family and kids for a year without telling them?
Are there services to reintegrate these people with their family if it's a widely acknowledged problem?
In reaction some people buy a Harley, some seek escape in adultery, some commit suicide... and a few disappear and start a new life.
I remember this case from Finland. Police were asking for clues about a man named Janne after he had been missing for a week and a half. Some days later the police announced that they had been in contact with the man and that he was alive. However, he did not want to have his current location revealed and the police obeyed that.
"People in Finland have the right to disappear. If a person wants to remain hidden, there's nothing the police can do about that" they said. The only thing they were able to tell his family was that he was still alive.
Really? In most European countries there is a requirement to register your home address with the state. See https://www.norden.org/en/info-norden/notifying-move-and-pop...
So you can hide your location from family but you do not have a general right to hide from the state. The same applies in all the Nordic countries.
https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20200731-the-saboteurs-...
Loans and leases in Japan most often require a guarantor. If the primary loan holder disappears, the guarantor is stuck having to repay the loan or pay out the remainder of the lease agreement.
I personally know a family devastated when they found themselves on the hook paying out a loan for a close friend they had known from childhood while trying to build their own business.
If the person needs a guarantor, it means that they cannot afford the loan.
Even if they have the best of intentions, life may happen (people die before their time for many reasons), they can get caught up with the wrong crowd and fall out of (financial) grace, a bad partner can get them to "drop this life and move away" (ignoring obligations), and you can end with a damaging debt.
https://melmagazine.com/en-us/story/inside-the-world-of-inve...
If you're trying to evade someone that's technically savvy you'll need to take steps to make sure you don't pop up on photos and perhaps adopt a different writing style.
For more advanced scenarios it just keeps escalating to more and more difficult measures to take. For most people the really extreme measures aren't necessary.
A lot of Japanese things are romanticized by using their Japanese monikers but when you zoom out, it's the same problems, different setting.
But I'd totally read a deep dive into similarities/differences between western shut-ins and hokikomori. I don't understand differences here either.
Some Asian cultures, especially Japan, have an inside-outside psychology. They present one face (image) to themself, family and close friends, and another to the office and strangers. It's like a mild form of multiple-personality disorder, but on an hourly basis:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honne_and_tatemae
Also there can be extreme pressures within the family on what to study or do as a career, and resulting shame in not measuring up. One of my Japanese female friends had to run away from home to the US to study at art college, for example.
(To summarize, you cannot apply Western cultural norms to countries like Japan, which have no cultural similarities.)
For non-Japanese countries, religion can result in an inside-outside split personality also, especially with social media and surveillance culture today.
Most of my Muslim friends have private social media accounts for that reason, and even then are very selective about what to post for even friends and family to see, to avoid shaming drama. Doubly so in Islamic republics.
Anyway, suicide mostly comes from desperate mental situations, not people making business plans.
...maybe if there was a way to reset your brain in the process.
The intent of telling me this when I was impressionable was the opposite of what I received. I understand that "you bring your problems with you", but at the time I received "don't bother travelling because it's the same shit in a different place". So I've not been the globe-trotter my sibling has been. Night and Day.
The only regret here is that the original intent got flipped from the giving to the receiving. Be careful.
5 stars, would use again.
Before the late twentieth century, allusions were often a form of gatekeeping. Now they're a kind invitation to join today's lucky 10'000. 开卷有益.
In general, does this fiercely protected privacy culture extend to online? No surveillance capitalism in Japan?
The big thing is that the legal system won't help you if you want to track someone. You can't file a missing person report and expect police to investigate and private companies to hand you data.
If you file a lawsuit against someone in Japan, is it really true that they can't be served or subpoenaed?
People are a lot more conscious of putting pictures of people's faces online. Many people avoid putting any pictures of faces on social media accounts. People censor other's faces in pictures, or even their own children's.
While your average person might be more privacy conscious in this way, there seems to be a general feeling of "trust large institutions". They seem to collect as much information as anywhere else.
For best results, work in a dust, fibre, and debris-free low humidity space with fume extraction as ventilation rather than open windows.
It is very difficult and expensive, as for full protection you need to register LLCs and legal trusts for many things like home ownership. Additionally because we live in a surveillance capitalism dystopia, one little mistake can ruin everything and cause you to start over.
If you wander in front of someone taking a photo that ends up on facebook, or socialise with people who post things on social media or someone from your home town sees you and mentions it to someone else. I think I'd always be looking over my shoulder
In the US I helped a female relative obscure her trail somewhat from a stalker when she sold her residence and moved states. She could not get classified under the domestic violence identity protection program of her state until she suffered physical abuse of some kind recorded by the police. There was "only" police report of the stalker arriving outside her front door in a doorman-guarded complex, with security footage of him banging on her door for ~10 hours. Twice (after that, the complex security knew him by sight and threw him out the next three times before he gave up). So be aware that most of these types of programs across the US are reactive and not proactive.
With enough money and patience, a lot of everyday people can be eventually found unless they submerge themselves into a highly-insular community. However, above a certain threshhold of money and effort, I believe the advantage accrues to the hider instead of the seeker, even with nation-state resources at the seeker's fingertips. I believe it is far more time-efficient for the seeker to burrow their way into the hider's network of contacts.
I work in the public sector, and it’s actually not that hard to declare someone dead and issue a new SSN, or perhaps even a fake permanent refugee permit that will be eligible for a SSN after a few years. The processes around it aren’t really that audited, and nothing about the last part of it would pop up in any audit. It’s also done by some of our lowest payed employees who are hopelessly overworked, making it even easier to hide.
I wonder if anyone is selling this service illegally.
The internet has created a world in which, no matter where you go, there is never an escape from your past, no easy way to pack your bags and start fresh.
On top of that, the internet opens users from any particular nation to identity theft by criminals all around the world.
This state of affairs is still young. A few more decades, and many more people will be seeking out a change of identity, a new address, maybe even plastic surgery. Witness relocation: it's not just for witnesses, anymore.
I can see hacking and selective digital profile construction being done to remove traces of one's previous digital presence then replace it with another, and I can see people cleverly forging highly sophisticated fake official identity documents to back up their new names.
All of that sure, but if one's ID is both governmentally and by corporations being increasingly connected to the structure of their face, or their gait, or their eyes or some other feature that a public camera could conceivably read, then how will the near future even allow anyone to make any of these identity jumps (legal or illegal)?
We are also printing organs and skin using 3D printers right now. I don't see why we won't be able to change people drastically by reprinting their unique biometrics and replace through surgery. If you don't have your old hand, then your fingerprints becomes useless.
You can already order kits to fake biometrics authentication/creation.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/nov/15/fake-fing...
but this is worrying: https://venturebeat.com/2019/10/29/researchers-fool-person-d...
Just search adversarial [item] on Google.
Not really considering Breaking Bad was about disappearing from the law.
For example, I have gained an unexpected insight into Korean constitutional jurisprudence from watching Secret Forest.
Weirdly, the title (in the page header) of the mirror page is wrong. Seems to be for another article. The actual mirrored content seems correct though.