What the Working Group Decided
On July 22, 2026, the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications' Working Group on Countermeasures Against Improper Use held its 14th meeting and finalized the policy direction for implementing rules under the amended Mobile Phone Improper Use Prevention Act (携帯電話不正利用防止法) — published as "制度整備の方向性について" (the direction of institutional arrangements) on the ministry's site. The headline commitment: from April 2027, telecom operators must verify a customer's identity using IC-chip data — read from a My Number Card, driver's license, or residence card — even for face-to-face SIM contracts signed in a physical store (Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications).
This is the second of two phases. The first already happened: an ordinance amendment that took effect April 1, 2026 retired the old non-face-to-face method of comparing a photographed ID document against a selfie, replacing it with IC-chip reads or JPKI (public personal identity authentication) checks for online and app-based SIM sign-ups. MIC's public comment results on that ordinance, published February 27, 2026, show the consultation drew just 11 responses over a Dec. 6, 2025–Jan. 9, 2026 window (MIC public comment results). The 2027 phase extends the same IC-chip standard to in-store transactions, closing what regulators view as the weaker link.
The Fraud Problem Is Real
The steelman case here is straightforward and MIC has made it consistently since it first signaled the tightening in September 2025: mobile lines obtained under someone else's identity are a direct input into Japan's tokushu sagi (special fraud) economy — the phone-and-bank-transfer scams that fleece elderly victims. Kyodo News reported that MIC's original announcement cited two specific abuse patterns: contracts opened with counterfeit driver's licenses, and a newer trick where stolen ID/password pairs let a fraudster impersonate an existing subscriber to add a second line under the victim's name (Kyodo News via Yahoo). MIC's fix bans password-only verification for additional lines and requires the same IC-chip rigor in person that already applies online. A forged photo ID can fool a store clerk's eye; it cannot forge the cryptographic signature on a chip. That is a genuine security upgrade, not security theater, and a jurisdiction serious about cutting off fraud's supply chain of burner SIMs is right to close this gap.
Where the Timeline Outpaces the Infrastructure
The operator pushback, flagged during MIC's public consultation and reported by Telecompaper, centers on cost and customer readiness rather than the goal itself (Telecompaper). Both concerns are legitimate. IC-chip reading at a physical counter requires either NFC-capable point-of-sale hardware or a staff-facing card reader at every outlet — a real capital cost for the store networks of Japan's MVNOs and value carriers, which built low-cost businesses partly on lighter-touch, faster checkout. Nikkei xTech's coverage frames the April 2027 date as the moment IC-chip verification becomes the standard method for face-to-face contracts across telecom and banking alike, not an optional upgrade path (Nikkei xTech).
The customer-readiness half of the concern is where the numbers get uncomfortable. As of the end of January 2026, My Number Card possession stood at 81.2% of Japan's population nationally — but with real geographic spread, from Miyazaki's 86% down to Okinawa's roughly 71% (BCN+R). Possession is not the same as being able to produce the card, with its PIN, at a phone shop counter on the spot: a meaningful share of cardholders don't carry it day to day, and the elderly population that MIC is explicitly trying to protect from fraud is also the cohort least likely to have registered for or memorized a JPKI PIN. A mandate designed to protect vulnerable subscribers risks, if rushed, locking some of those same subscribers out of getting a phone line at all.
The Proportionate Fix Is Sequencing, Not Retreat
None of this argues against the rule. It argues for MIC using the runway between now and April 2027 deliberately: publish store-level compliance guidance and any capital-cost relief for smaller MVNOs well before the deadline, and pair the mandate with a genuine fallback path — supervised in-branch JPKI re-enrollment, for instance — for the substantial minority who will otherwise show up at a shop without a usable chip. The working group's own two-phase structure, online first in April 2026, in-person over a year later, already shows MIC understands sequencing matters. The test now is whether the implementing ministerial ordinance, expected to follow this working-group direction, builds enough slack for card-readiness gaps to close before enforcement bites — rather than treating April 2027 as a hard wall that penalizes operators and customers for an adoption curve the state itself is still climbing.