Kathleen Morikawa's Jan. 8 Zeit Gist article, "Following in our fingerprints," is one of the best summaries of the movement against fingerprinting in alien registration from 1955 to 2000. Contrary to her claim, though, the government never gave in.
The Ministry of Justice won every battle it set out to win. The national government began to abandon its interest in alien fingerprinting long before the refusal movement began. It turned the movement into an opportunity to phase out fingerprinting as a vestige of an outdated law, simplify and computerize alien registration, and centralize MOJ's control of registration by giving it powers originally delegated to local governments.
Many local governments which supported reform, including the city where I refused (to be fingerprinted), did so partly because the system was inefficient, but mostly because they wanted to divest themselves of the delegated obligation to enforce the law by reporting refusers -- a responsibility that allowed local civil servant unions to hold local governments hostage to their radical agendas.
In 1983, while Morikawa was in court, the National Police Agency deployed the world's first successful Automated Fingerprint Identification System. NEC, its codeveloper, began installing AFIS systems around the world. Today the company boasts that its share of the global "biometrics solutions market" exceeds 60 percent. Guess whose logo emblazons the machines at Narita.
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