Comment by dragontamer | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dragontamer | Hacker News Reader

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IIRC, its still "high culture" in Japan to have custom seals / stamps made to represent your family.

You can't "stamp" an email with the family seal. You can stamp a piece of paper and then fax it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mon_(emblem)

Crests, coats of arms, flags... these things kinda-sorta died out in America. (Indeed: people came to America to escape the Nobility's culture from Europe). But Japan has a lot of families with "samurai" lineage, the old Nobles from 500 years ago... as well as a connection to their families crests, emblems, flags, etc. etc.

Culturally, its important to at least enough of them, to keep those traditions alive. Fax works for that. Email doesn't seem to quite do the family seal/mon justice.

After all, if you've got this stamp that's been in the family for the past 300 years, you're gonna want to keep using it for tradition's sake. (Maybe not the actual 300-year-old family relic, but replications of it on modern rubber).

You might actually be thinking of hankos, which are widely used in every-day paperwork, and they are usually a personal seal rather than a family seal. I don't think they're high culture, as almost everyone has one and they're used for day-to-day document signing of many types of documents, like opening a bank account or filing taxes and so on.

They're also part of some important business practices. One such practice called nemawashi, which is a "peer consensus" required for big decisions in some companies. A document outlining the change or project you want to undertake circulates to all peers or superiors it would reasonably affect, and they must all sign with their hanko in order for the process to be accepted.

Although there are some high-culture elements to them, such as having a bigger hanko if you're in a higher position in the company, some etiquette around hanko placement on the page depending on your rank in the company. There is also a tradition of giving a fancier hanko as a coming of age gift, those used to be of ivory (and still can be, Ivory in Japan is a fairly fascinating topic in itself).

I appreciate your insight.

I'm definitely an outsider, but I've seen these stamp before. I didn't know its full cultural significance.

I've looked at hankos on Wikipedia, and they look like that object I've seen before. Thanks for introducing me to the right word to research on!

Mine is my initials in Latin characters in Times New Roman lol

What if we turn these stamp into some kind of NFTs that you can then stamp a hash into your messages and documents?

You mean e-signatures? Which is what I use in my office whenever we sign documents around here?

I'm sure Japan knows about e-signatures. The problem is that of "culture" perhaps? I'm not entirely convinced that this stamp-thing is a bad thing for Japanese culture, or that this is an issue that needs "fixing".

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But "if it does need fixing" (and again, I don't think I agree with that mindset...), e-signatures are readily available and easily done in Adobe-PDF readers, backed up by public/private key infrastructure given out by your company's smartcard system (or whatever).

A number of government regulations still require hankos, which is one of the reasons e-signatures aren't more heavily used. The government has been aiming for digitalization, and part of that is eliminating regulations that require hankos, so e-signatures have been becoming more usable lately.

Hanko culture, however, is harder to kill off. Part of that is things like more senior employees having larger hankos, needing to tilt your hanko signature to "bow" to your managers, etc. Japanese E-signature platforms generally have seals, and offer features to change the size of the seal, and to rotate it, to support the cultural aspects of hanko culture.

No, I mean Non Fungible Tokens, powered by the blockchain, put emails on the blockchain.

Why would you need NFTs / Blockchain to run "OpenSSL / RSA_sign()" on a bunch of bytes?

Maybe something like https://login.xyz/

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