Or have to go through great lengths to escape.
In my country you can’t buy any medicine without showing your ID… I mean, you technically can, but if you are registered they “give” like an 80% discount, so everyone thinks it’s a great deal, not realizing that’s the normal price, they are just pretending you can still go and buy a simple cold medicine without sharing your ID, phone, email, and street address with the drug store and whoever they decide to sell that information to, you just have to pay absurdly more. Yeah, you can lie about all the other information, but not really about your ID number. Probably soon, to get the “discount”, you are going to have to verify your email or phone number as well.
That’s quite interesting, did you have other sort of compulsory ID before the national one? Like, what did you use to register to stuff, like enrolling in school or college, opening a bank account or getting a retirement plan, etc.
In my country we have both the state and national ID. I guess very long ago you could use your state ID to register to stuff, but as they pushed for more standardization everything started to require your national ID instead, and your state ID card was more a proof that you are who you claim to be (like, you have to collect a parcel somewhere and show it belongs to you, or if you are stopped by the police you can show your state ID)… but usually people just use the driver’s license because it has both ID numbers and your picture, so it’s a valid document for everything.
For a lot of people for a long time your insurance card (that didn’t have a photo) was the only “identification” you had. Otherwise you had to bring your school ID, work ID etc.
Most people don’t have drivers licenses cause they take the train. When you sign up for banks etc you usually have to get a bunch of official documentation from the local ward office with your information.
Proof of identity in Japan has always been a bit of a hazy problem. You sign most documents still with a family stamp, so the idea of what legally is defined as identifying is kind of vague.
Most local offices aren’t networked up, so when you move you have to register with your local ward office and the japanese beauricratic army goes and gets the previous ward office to fax over your info.
“My Number” is the japanese governments attempt to get all that stuff wired together in one database.