Photo/Illutration The government will abolish the “hanko” seal requirement in all administrative procedures requiring personal seals that are not registered with local municipalities. (Asahi Shimbun file photo)

The government plans to end “hanko” stamp requirements in almost all of the nation’s administrative procedures as part of wide-ranging efforts to reduce red tape and promote digitization.

It will remove hanko requirements in cases where documents currently need to be stamped with personal seals, such as requests for copies of residence certificates, official notifications of moving in or out of a residence and marriage registrations, officials said.

Hanko will only still be needed for a handful of government procedures requiring official seals registered with local municipalities.

Taro Kono, state minister in charge of administrative reform, asked government ministries and agencies to report on their plans to drop hanko requirements from their administrative procedures.

They responded that they will “abolish” the requirement in 99 percent of roughly 14,700 procedures, officials said. Of them, about 12,400 procedures where unregistered personal seals can be used instead of registered ones will no longer need to be stamped.

The government plans to revise government and ministerial ordinances by the end of this year at the earliest to streamline those procedures.

It intends to submit legislation to be passed in next year’s ordinary Diet session for cases where legal revisions must be made before the requirement can be removed.

The government plans to stamp out hanko requirements across more than 10 million types of administrative procedures that ordinary citizens go through each year, such as when they ask for copies of residence certificates. About 65 million requests for copies of residence certificates are submitted to local municipalities each year.

The internal affairs ministry will no longer require documents for the requests to be either stamped with hanko seals or signed, meaning applicants’ identity will be confirmed only by their driver’s licenses, My Number cards or other such forms of identification.

A transport ministry ordinance currently requires that drivers must stamp forms for regular “shaken” vehicle inspections with their hanko seals, but that requirement will be reviewed, according to a ministry official.

Local municipalities will continue to register hanko seal impressions.

Authorities will also continue to require registered seals in applications for registering a change in land ownership and for commercial and corporate registrations, which are needed when establishing new companies.

The government said it will narrow down its list of several thousand procedures requiring registered seals and official seal-registration certificates to around 80.

The procedures subject to change will include filing an inheritance tax return, where registered seals are currently needed in documents showing how a deceased person’s estate is to be divided between heirs.

The Justice Ministry will continue to require forms for marriage and divorce registrations to be signed.

“Signatures are needed to be submitted as evidence in cases of lawsuits seeking nullification of a marriage registered by someone pretending to be the one who made the contract,” a ministry official said.

(This article was written by Senior Staff Writer Toshiki Horigome, Rui Hosomi and Hisashi Naito.)

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