Nice as this all seems, the process for accessing the information in one's koseki is amazingly primitive. Most times that you need to do something official in Japan as a Japanese citizen, a copy of your koseki is required. Open a bank account and you'll need one. Apply for a passport and you'll need one etc. You'll not only need an original hard copy transcript of your koseki (tōhon/short-form or shōhon/long-form), but it will need to be dated within the last 3 months.

How do you get one? Online? No. Got to visit your city/village/ward office. Any local city/village/ward office? No, it's got to be within the district where your koseki is held. OK, let's take a trip back to our hometown in the evening - surely there's a 24 hour kiosk in the lobby where I can print one out? No. Come during business hours, fill out a paper form requesting a transcript, take a number, wait in line to submit the request form. Go over what you wrote in the request form with an extremely nice and polite bureaucrat. Take another number to wait in line to pay about US$1.50 for the hard copy. Then a final number to pick up the hard copy. Wow.

Why's this so hard? Well, although the contents of the koseki are of course computerized, these records are held at the ward/village/city office level and not nationally. Sure, the police, immigration authorities and others likely have a way to access each ward office's system, but as a citizen you have to physically trudge down to the office in the region where your koseki is held and request a copy. Not so bad if you're living near your family (since your koseki is typically kept at the ancestral home of your family, not necessarily where you live day-to-day), but if you've moved across Japan or internationally, you're screwed. Hope you have a family member you can deputise to go get one for you or that you have a good number of frequent flyer points to burn.

The article seems to say it's pretty straight forward from overseas at any Japanese consulate. Well, not so much. Strangely enough, write access from overseas is pretty easy. Read access from overseas doesn't exist.

Case in point - my wife and I recently had a baby born in the Bay Area who is eligible for Japanese citizenship. No problems, we head to the consulate and fill out the paperwork, provide all the birth proof documents and pay a small fee. The consulate sends the birth details to the city/village/ward office where our koseki is held and that ward office adds our baby to it a week or two later. Now, we need a passport. Can we just ask the consulate to authenticate our baby since they just added him to our koseki? Nope. We have to fly to Japan to visit the city/ward office where our koseki is held, or deputize a family member in Japan to do so for us, obtain a hard-copy of the updated koseki, have it posted to us in California and we then bring it into the consulate to prove our baby's citizenship - citizenship that they themselves just authenticated a few weeks ago. Wow. On top of that, there's no way of knowing when our baby has been added, so we just need to ask our family members to go down once a week for the next few weeks, request and pay for a copy and when our son appears, claim success.

So yes, it's a great system, but it's so very paper and physical presence based that it hurts.

Surprisingly enough, especially for Japan, foreigners have it easier. Since foreign residents are not on a koseki (well, they are in the case that they're married to a Japanese citizen but only in the "comments" section of the koseki, not the actual core of it and that's a whole 'nother story), none of this paperwork is required when foreigners want to deal with the Japanese bureaucracy. Instead, foreigners are required to carry a plastic ID card (called a "Zairyu card" in its latest permutation) and this has all the necessary information. No 3 month expiry, no ward office visit. So, there's at least one area that non-Japanese have it easier in Japan that citizens!