On Sunday I went to the Samezu driving-test center (1-12-5 Higashi-Oi, Shinagawa) and renewed my license. In the decades since I first held one, the card has changed little by little; this time the remarks column on the back was halved, and the rest became an organ-donation intent box. I was told “entry is optional,” so I will think a bit before deciding — what have you done?
According to the Japan Organ Transplant Network (head office: Minato, Tokyo), in the three years since the amended Organ Transplant Act took effect, 138 people donated after brain death, about 80 percent of them with family consent (as of June 30, 2013). In July the Network published a survey of 1,000 men and women aged 10–60 on intent indication: 18 percent held a donor card (17.7 last year), while 78.5 percent held a driver’s license (80.7); of those, 57.5 percent had a back-side intent column (45.5). Among people with such a license who had actually indicated intent, 16.2 percent (17.2) — so it seems fairly useful.
Through August 10 the Mainichi morning edition (Tokyo) ran a ten-part series “Stories of Living: Connecting Lives,” about a Kyoto University pharmacy sixth-year who had a heart transplant in Canada at fifteen ten years ago and now aims to be a pharmaceutical researcher; the last installment also introduced the license intent column, so it will likely spread further.
By the way, licenses have been issued with IC chips in stages since 2007. Mine was already an IC card last time. The chip holds the same data as the printed license to prevent forgery; if something looks suspicious, they compare print and chip. The registered domicile is not printed; it lives only in the chip.
To protect the data you need PINs. At Samezu I set two four-digit numbers. The first is for name, address, birth date, and the like; add the second and “domicile and face photo” appear, they say.
Reading the chip needs a dedicated reader. Samezu had quite a few on the first, second, and third floors; hold the license to one, enter the PIN, and “domicile” floats into the blank.
Banks and post offices can do stricter ID checks with these readers, I hear, but I have never seen one at a bank or post office — are they spreading quietly somewhere? In the three years on my previous license I had completely forgotten the chip and PINs.
Where, exactly, does one use them?