19th century ritual forcing Japanese workers to board trains and offices amid a coronavirus pandemic – The Press Stories

Tokyo Despite an official homework campaign and the unprecedented coronavirus crisis putting Japan in a state of emergency, Sayaka Azuma always visits his office in Tokyos Nishi-Azabu district regularly.

Everyone else in his tech company, Venture Republic, is locked up at home. But once a week, Azuma has to return to his office only to perform a ritual that dates back to the 19th century. Opening a velvet case, she grabs a wood hankoor seal by hand, apply vermilion ink and begin to carefully stamp a stack of official documents, affixing the stylized corporate seal on each page.

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For security reasons, I am not allowed to take the company seals home, she told the CBS News partner network. TBS. So I have to go to the office to use them.

Azuma is not alone: many workers say they are forced to keep on packed trains in the city only to stamp by hand, or to print documents or perform other office work that would seem redundant to our digital age.

The continued use of hand seals in the Japanese business community is one of the reasons why suburban traffic remains stubbornly high in major cities well below the target of an 80% reduction, according to experts, must be reached in order to control the coronavirus epidemic here.

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Research by a nonprofit organization, conducted this year, found that only 43% of Japanese businesses have adopted digital seals. Even among the high-tech companies in Tokyo that have adopted telework, almost all were still forced to deploy employees for hand stamping tasks.

For more than a century, dating from an era of low literacy, the Japanese have brandished finely carved hand seals not their John Hancocks to approve contracts, buy real estate, incorporate businesses and even sign school permission slips. In a way, in the midst of automation and digitization, the hanko managed to hang on.

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The old custom has a loyal ally in the current government. Naokazu Takemoto, 79, who has been inexplicably entrusted with the governments information technology portfolio, is a big supporter of this archaic practice.

Takemoto gained fame last year after its website went offline and stayed there for months. He heads a parliamentary group dedicated to the preservation of hand seals. Asked if it was finally time to give Hanko the boot, Takemoto told reporters in mid-March that such migration was at the mercy of the private sector.

The root of the problem is not hanko its our paper-centric office work culture, writer Soichiro Matsutani told Yahoo News. Many offices were frozen in the 1970s or 1980s, and never went beyond word processors, photocopiers and fax machines.

But this time, with lives and livelihoods at stake, calls for the abolition of seals are growing stronger. A closely watched IT company, GMO, has announced that it is phasing out the use of hand seals. Seeing the writing on the wall, seal maker Shachihata unveiled a cloud-based signature service that allows users to apply an analog-like analog or vermilion seal to documents online.

The company gleaned around 2,000 orders in February for its seal that doesnt require an ink pad, which has a unique digital signature to prevent counterfeiting. In April, orders had reached 110,000.

Source > https://www.cbsnews.com/news/19th-century-ritual-forcing-japanese-workers-into-trains-and-offices-amid-a-coronavirus-pandemic/

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19th century ritual forcing Japanese workers to board trains and offices amid a coronavirus pandemic - The Press Stories