Japan's 'Evaporated People' | Hacker News Reader

Japan's 'Evaporated People'

bookofjoe.com

29 pointsbookofjoe14 comments

I think it's kind of great that this can still happen in a country as modern as Japan. We truly lost a lot of freedom due to the tyranny of fresh starts literally being impossible.

Freedom can be abused- literally in the case of children being "disappeared" by their parents.

Of course. Every freedom can be exploited.

Here in Argentina each person has a "unique"[1] DNI number that kakas tracking easy. It's like the SSN in USA, but here it-s not a secret and it appears in many documents. Do they have something like that in Japan?

[1] There use to be many burocratic errors that make the number not unique For example they assigned a town a range 30.000.000-30.000.999 and the next town the range 30.001.000-30.001.999, but after the first town used all their numbers they continue sequentially and overlapped the numbers of the other town. It's supposed to be fixed now, but old people numbers are full of surprises. One of my coworkers had to merge many big data bases and he still get nightmares about deduplications in spite the DNI is supposed to be a go unique identifier.

In the USA, your SSN is supposed to be kept confidential, almost like a PIN for an account. When you think about it, that's an absurdly bad system. It's like if it was a security risk to let people know your real name.

> It's like if it was a security risk to let people know your real name.

In primary school I read Jonathan Stroud’s Bartimaeus Sequence (a children’s books trilogy) where this is part of the plot. Knowing someone’s real name allows a magician to cast spells on that person. :)

The world of Harry Dresden, the main character was given additional middle names by his parents to buffer against this kind of attack.

It's a little harder for attackers since magic requires them to hear your name(s) in person from your own mouth, rather than being able to read it off a page.

There's also true names in DND which were given by gods and if learned would allow you to control the creature. If I'm remembering NVN correctly :)

It is a very old trope https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/True_name

That was one of my favorite series growing up; I always thought it would make for a great series on the small screen.

Japan is a unique world all to itself. Read up on how houses and streets are numbered and you will arrive at a similar chaos!

Whoa, did you launch a website? :)

Yes — in 2004: https://www.bookofjoe.com/2004/08/24/index.html

Awesome--that was a while ago. Think I only just noticed because usually it's archive links. Thank-you for those!

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