What translated documents on gyaku.jp have to do with you and the fingerprinting of all foreigners in Japan

On October 07, 2007 in Interviews, Rights of foreigners

“Just under one year ago, revelations emerged that a contract for a new biometric immigration system had been awarded by the Japanese government to Accenture Japan Ltd., a corporation previously hired in the role of “advisor” for the same project, at a price of only 100,000 yen (less than 900 USD).” - (Excerpt from gyaku.jp)

Wait. Rewind.

The company hired as advisor for Japan’s biometric immigration system (for fingerprinting foreigners entering the country) has also won the contract to implement that same system?! And on top of that, the amount of their bid that won the contract would not pay for the cost of a laptop in Japan! Something does not add up…

This is the story that House of Representatives member Hosaka Nobuto has been trying to make known since April 21st 2006; a story that is still widely unknown amongst the group that potentially has the most to benefit from it… non-Japanese in Japan.

It is a story that we found out about first on gyaku.jp, and when we did we knew we had to present it here.

We since interviewed gyaku.jp about the article. The contents of that interview are below. (For full English translations of documents related to this issue see the following article on gyaku.jp’s site –> Accenture, JAPAN-VISIT, and the mystery of the 100,000 yen bid)

Daily J: I believe your article mentioned that this issue affects not only foreigners in Japan but also Japanese nationals, Americans, and possibly many more if Accenture’s technology is incorporated into immigration systems in other countries (likely in SE Asia). Can you explain briefly how these others will be affected, particularly Japanese nationals?

Shioyama: I think you are referring to the translation of Mizuho Fukushima’s speech in the Diet (http://gyaku.jp/en/index.php?cmd=contentview&pid=000178). She made the point that Accenture is being commissioned for a whole slew of institutions: Imperial Household Agency, the Fair Trade Commission, the Ministry of Justice, the Ministry of Finance, and the National Tax Agency. She argued that among these, the Ministry of Justice in particular deals with very sensitive information of Japanese citizens, and that this information might get leaked.

Actually the most interesting part of that particular exchange is former-PM Koizumi’s response. He couldn’t even pronounce the name Accenture (in Japanese). He clearly had very little idea of what the company was going to be doing with the information, which I think is pretty scary.

The main target of this particular article however wasn’t really Japanese nationals. It was targeted at two groups, who we thought could make use of the English-language materials about the 100,000 yen bid which we translated: Americans and (English-speaking) foreigners living in Japan. That’s not a statement about who “this issue affects”, because I’m sure it affects a much broader range of people. The materials that we translated had not been available earlier in English, and we thought that they could serve as an important means of leverage in trying to reverse or delay the new policy.

Daily J: What did you have in mind as far as a reaction when you started translating and discussing this issue? In other words, how do you want people to react? Are you asking for advocacy? If so, what measures do you think would be most effective?

Shioyama: We’re not asking for anything, we’re simply providing something which was lacking, i.e. translations of (what we believe to be) important documents related to the issue of the JAPAN-VISIT program.

I think if you read over the article, you’ll see that while it deals with fingerprinting and JAPAN-VISIT in general, it is quite specifically focused on the 100,000 yen bid incident. The reason is that, first of all, there is already a lot of material out there about fingerprinting in Japan (see for example Debito’s site). Our interest in translating these Diet session proceedings, blog entry, etc. was in opening up a new avenue in the debate, an avenue which I continue to think could prove to be very useful in exposing what Accenture is trying to do here.

Beyond that, however, it’s really hard to say what would be best. That’s really a topic that other people might have a better idea about.

I will say, however, that we put a lot of time and effort into translating this stuff expecting that more people would be interested, and the reaction we got was somewhat less than satisfying. Although Debito posted a blog entry about it, and there were a couple comments, given the nature of this story (Accenture was paid only 1000 USD to implement a fingerprinting system in Japan) I had really hoped more people would pick it up. The more you look at the details of this story, the more sketchy the whole thing comes out looking.

Another thing is that Diet members such as Hosaka Nobuto put a lot of effort into exposing this story. He was really almost alone in doing this, and yet the people who could potentially most directly benefit from the work he did — i.e. non-Japanese living in Japan — hardly know about the story. That was a big motivation in translating all this stuff and writing the article.

Again, full translations are available at gyaku.jp Accenture, JAPAN-VISIT, and the mystery of the 100,000 yen bid.

We have more information about this issue and an announcement about an upcoming symposium about the JAPAN-VISIT program that will be organised by Amnesty International.

Look for that tomorrow,

here on Daily J.

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