This week, on Dai-Cast it’s “Dai Cast Zeta”, where we pick one particular topic on Japan or Japanese pop culture, and stick with it, exhaustively expressing our opinions for your education, elucidation, emancipation, and mental emolument, to summarily beat it into the ground, so that we never need to revisit the topic again.
This time around we go into the new immigration practice in Japan of fingerprinting and photographing all foreigners upon entry to the country. We go into what this means to you, and your civil liberties, and then launch off in all directions of personal freedom, security and surveillance.
So sit back, and prepare to be educated at!
Hosts: Ian Horner, and Brendan Dery as “Beej”, with special guest Carol Haggerty.
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Recommended Reading:
- Japan to Fingerprint Foreigners – cbsnews.com
- Government Informational Video – nettv.gov-online.go.jp
- “Re-Entry Japan” Blog – reentryjapan.blogspot.com
- Divided International Opinions on the Fingerprinting – japan-guide.com
- Media Reports on the New Fingerprinting System – japanprobe.com
- More Media Reports on the System – japanprobe.com
- Beej’s Web Comic of The Week – This Modern World
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A very thought provoking episode. From this point on I will devise a strategy for every time I ever get into a Japanese cab.
I can understand why people don’t like the idea of having to share their fingerprints and I’m one of those people. But on the other hand, most of us aren’t terrorists so we might as well go along with it?
On a similar ‘Big Brother’ note, when I was in Tokyo I purchased a bought a Suica card and the machine gave me the option to type my name in to be printed on the card… It wasn’t until afterwards I wondered if maybe my name was now sitting on the JR computer system, and that every train journey I took was being recorded and monitored. But as I said before, I had nothing to hide. I was an innocent tourist so as far as I was concerned they could monitor me all they wanted.