FUKUOKA--Non-Japanese students have provided a lifeline to a personal seal maker here at a time when the city government is phasing out the traditional “inkan” practice.

But creating the seals with katakana characters has created unprecedented challenges.

Minohara Inbo, a stamp shop near Nishitetsu Ohashi Station in Fukuoka’s Minami Ward, is currently flooded with orders for name stamps.

Although the city government wants to do away with inkan seals for administrative procedures, the seals are still essential for paperwork in many processes, such as applying for part-time jobs and renting apartments.

Yoshiyuki Minohara, 61, manager of the store, said the number of students from nearby Japanese language and other vocational schools who order inkan started to surge two years ago.

The store now receives up to 50 orders a month.

But the seals for non-Japanese customers--many of whom are Nepalese and Vietnamese--must be made individually because existing kanji inkan cannot represent their names.

Since their names in romaji may be unreadable for Japanese, katakana characters, from left to right, are carved into the seals.

Very long names cannot be shown because standardized seals must be 1 centimeter in diameter and contain a maximum of five letters.

Minohara said he once managed to carve a five-character name by inscribing three and two characters separately on two rows.

Determining the katakana expressions of foreign names can present another challenge.

The Fukuoka Japanese Language School in the ward informs students before their enrollment that the traditional stamp is a must-have item in Japan.

Inkan are often required when signing contracts with part-time job providers or filling forms of apartment rental agents.

With effectively no inkan stores in Vietnam and Nepal, the school operator makes orders on behalf of its students.

Previously, many of its students were Chinese or South Korean who already had their own seals. But after the student body diversified, more than 80 percent of them now buy inkan in Japan.

A 20-year-old man from Nepal was told by a Japanese language school to make an inkan three years ago.

Although both the family and given names must be written for identification purposes in Nepal, both names cannot fit on a single inkan. So only his family name was engraved on the seal.

After he lost the inkan, his given name was carved on a new seal for school- and job-related documents.

“The inkan is useful because the given name is enough to identify myself,” he said.

At Minohara Inbo, an inkan priced at 1,400 yen ($12.70) is especially popular among non-Japanese students. Fewer people are buying the more expensive 10,000-yen stamps for their officially registered seals, so orders from foreigners account for about 40 percent of the store’s inkan sales.

“At first, I was struggling to show non-Japanese names on inkan, but I would not be able to continue my business unless I flexibly respond to the trend of the time,” Minohara said.

SHIFT TO PAPERLESS SOLUTIONS

Fukuoka city is known as the place where the oldest seal in Japan was found.

But in fiscal 2018, the municipality began reviewing its tradition of having citizens put their stamps on documents.

By October 2019, the city had removed the seal sections on 2,300 applications and other documents, or 55 percent of all forms. The ratio is expected to reach 70 percent by the end of fiscal 2020.

A 70-year-old part-time worker who recently visited a ward office in Fukuoka said she keeps around five inkan at home, including her formally registered one.

“Only signatures are required in many cases, and using inkan is troublesome, so the tradition of affixing seals should not necessarily be preserved,” she said.

To eliminate the task of stamping papers, a Hitachi Ltd. affiliate late last year jointly developed a robot to automatically affix the seals. One robotic arm supplies the sheets of paper while another arm applies the red ink for the inkan stamp.

“Affixing seals is required at many companies, and the work is regarded as a burden on employees,” a representative of the robot developer said.

If contracts and other documents are scanned before they are stamped, the robot can accurately affix the inkan. The process for one document requires about a minute.

The robot can be rented for a monthly fee of more than 100,000 yen, according to company representatives.

Behind the trend to phase out inkan is the central government's policy announced in 2017 to allow potential business owners to complete the necessary procedures on the internet.

The national inkan association opposed the policy, arguing that a long-standing tradition in Japanese culture could be lost.

The inkan industry, whose members are aging, faces a dire shortage of successors.

The association had 1,751 members in 2009, but the number halved to 941 by the end of June 2019.

Kazunori Tokunaga, 60, a director of the association and head of the Kyushu federation of inkan organizations, noted that personal seals can be used not only for identification but also to represent the confidence and creditworthiness of the user.

“All seals are one and only,” said Tokunaga, who lives in Okawa, Fukuoka Prefecture. “I want to preserve the inkan culture nurtured until now.”