One Card, Three Registries
Since June 14, 2026, Japan's Immigration Services Agency (ISA) has issued a new credential — the Tokutei Zairyu Card, or Specified Residence Card — that folds a mid-to-long-term foreign resident's immigration status onto the same IC chip as their My Number card, the identifier Japan already uses for tax filing, social insurance, and, for those who opt in, health insurance and bank-account linkage. Applications opened the following day at immigration offices and municipal windows, timed to coincide with status renewals, changes, or reissuances so residents complete both procedures in one visit instead of two. (ISA)
The timing is not incidental. Japan's foreign resident population hit 4,125,395 at the end of 2025 — a record, up 9.5% year-on-year, and the first time the country has crossed 4 million, driven largely by growth in the tokutei ginou (specified skilled worker) visa category that plugs labor shortages in caregiving, construction, and food service. (ISA press release) A population growing at that rate strains an administrative model built for a much smaller, more static one. The old system required a foreign resident to visit an immigration bureau to renew status and separately visit city hall to keep their My Number card current — a redundancy Japanese citizens don't face, since their identity documents were never split across two agencies to begin with.
The Case Against It
The strongest objection isn't paranoia — it's structural. Tying a mid-to-long-term resident's immigration status to the same rail used for tax and health-insurance identification concentrates two categories of information that used to sit in different offices onto one document and one number. Foreign residents are a population with less structural power to contest state errors than citizens, and immigration status is exactly the kind of attribute that invites discriminatory use if it leaks into contexts — a landlord's tenant screening, a employer's HR check, a police stop — where it has no business being consulted. And Japan's own record on getting this right is imperfect: in 2023, then-Prime Minister Kishida ordered a nationwide comprehensive review of every record linked through the My Number Portal after mismatched registrations surfaced in the health-insurance rollout, an acknowledgment from the government itself that linkage errors weren't hypothetical. (Digital Agency review directive) Bolting immigration status onto a system with that history, for a population less able to absorb the consequences of a wrong flag, deserves scrutiny rather than a shrug.
Why the Design Answers That Objection — Mostly
Three features of how Japan actually built this cut against the worst-case reading. First, it's opt-in: residents can keep carrying a separate Residence Card and My Number card indefinitely, and the ISA is explicit that acquisition of the combined card is voluntary, mirroring the My Number card's own non-mandatory status since its 2016 launch. (ISA) Second, the new card format actually reduces casual profiling risk rather than expanding it — visa type, period of stay, and other sensitive status details move off the visible card face and exist only inside the encrypted chip, readable solely with authorized equipment, instead of being printed in plain view for anyone who glances at the card. Third, and most structurally important, Japan's My Number system was built on a decentralized-management principle: no single database holds a resident's tax, health, and immigration records together. Each agency retains its own records, and cross-agency queries flow only through a dedicated information-provision network system for the specific legally enumerated purposes — the opposite of a unified surveillance database. (MIC/Cabinet Secretariat explainer) Banking linkage, meanwhile, remains genuinely optional under the 2024 Act on Management of Deposit Accounts Using Personal Numbers — banks must ask, but account holders can decline.
The Proportionate Read
This is what proportionate digital-ID design is supposed to look like: consolidate the paperwork burden, not the data architecture. Japan didn't need a new law restricting the merger, and critics who'd block it outright are fighting the wrong fight — the opt-in and decentralization already do the work that heavier-handed regulation would otherwise have to mandate. Other APAC governments building digital public infrastructure, from India's Aadhaar to Southeast Asian national-ID pushes, would do well to study this template: efficiency gains for residents navigating multiple bureaucracies, without a central honeypot of merged records.
But design intent isn't the same as execution, and Japan's own 2023 review is the reason to keep watching rather than declare the debate settled. The right regulatory posture from here isn't a new statute — it's the Personal Information Protection Commission staying visibly active on audit and error-disclosure as adoption scales, and the ISA resisting any future move to make the combined card the default issuance rather than a genuine choice. At 4.1 million residents and climbing, Japan doesn't get many more chances to get this right before the errors, if they come, land at a much larger scale than 2023's.