How digitisation is going in the land of robots.

Japan is special: partly hyper-technologised, partly fax machine. Administration in particular has always lagged behind the rest of the country’s development. Until now! Because something’s moving in the land of the rising sun.

In 2021, the Digital Agency Japan was founded to finally centralise and digitise government.

The goals:

• Unifying digital standards
• Speeding up e-government projects
• Building central infrastructure

With this, Japan is addressing a problem other countries know too: a lack of coordination and a tangle of different standards and requirements.

The backbone of digitisation is the My Number System. It gives every citizen a unique digital identification number for registering with authorities and services. Similar to Germany, more and more services are being digitised step by step, such as tax returns and applying for social benefits.

And yes: Japan has decided to finally get rid of paper and fax machines!!! On top of that, IT systems are meant to be unified, and shared platforms are meant to be created for the many individual regions.

A concrete example: moving house

In the past you had to show up in person at several authorities to re-register, entering and handwriting all the data again each time. Today, in more and more regions, Japanese citizens can re-register purely digitally.

So something’s happening. But similar to Germany, Japan is still fairly early in the process. And scepticism among broad parts of the population remains.

Sources

Digital Agency Japan
https://lnkd.in/dMFZAFpc
My Number System
https://lnkd.in/dEY8QRHW
OECD (2023/2024): Digital Government Reviews – Japan
https://lnkd.in/dTxX_jXS
World Bank GovTech & Digital Government analyses
https://lnkd.in/du6Jx7At

Image: Jezael Melgoza for Unsplash

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