The third meeting of the Advisory Council on the Standardization of Characters for Local Government Information Systems

Overview

Date and

Monday, February 16, 2026, from 15:00 to 17:00

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National Town and Village Halls and online conferences

Agenda

1. Opening
2. Agenda
- 1. Meetings of Specialized Working Teams
- 2. Meetings of the Character Identification Working Team
- 3. Consideration of the addition of administrative affairs standard characters
- 4. Addition of Standardized Characters for Registration to Standard Characters for Administrative Work
3) Closing

Material

Relevant policy

Unification and standardization of mission-critical systems for local governments

Summary of the Proceedings

Date and

Monday, February 16, 2026, from 15:00 to 17:00

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National Town and Village Halls and online conferences

Attendees

*Honorifics omitted

Chairman

Masahiko Shoji (Professor, Faculty of Sociology, Musashi University)

Member

Junko Obata (Professor, Nihon University Graduate School of Law)
Shoji Goto (President and Representative Director, Regional Informatization Research Institute Co
Hiroyuki Sasahara (Professor, Waseda University)
Kenichi Shirato (Manager of Health Promotion Section, Health and Welfare Department, Mitaka City)
Satoshi Harada (Senior Director of DX Promotion at Kyoto Sangyo University)
Mikihito Yoshioka (Director of Digital Strategy Department, Planning and Coordination Bureau, Kobe City)
Takayuki Ikeda (Director, Resident Program Division, Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications Local Government Bureau)
Kentaro Komaki (Director of digital infrastructure Promotion Office, Resident Program Division, Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications Local Government Bureau)
MOCHIZUKI Chihiro (Director, First Civil Affairs Division, Ministry of Justice Civil Affairs Bureau)
Mayoshi Furuya (Director, First Civil Affairs Division, Ministry of Justice Civil Affairs Bureau) * Absent
MINOHARA Tetsuhiro (Director, Data Standardization and Quality Improvement Support, Digital Agency Digital Society Common function)

Associate member

Yohei Saito (INES Corporation)
Shin'ya NAKAGAKI (INES Corporation)
Sayaka Yazawa (NEC Corporation)
Hiroaki Aoki (Hitachi Systems, Ltd.)
Chikahisa Omura (Fujitsu Japan Co., Ltd.)
Makoto Kawaguchi (FUJIFILM System Service Co., Ltd.)
Hitomi Tanimoto (Ryobi Systems Co., Ltd. (attendance by proxy))
Masakazu Yoshida (RYOMO SYSTEMS CO.,LTD.)

Agenda

1. Meetings of Specialized Working Teams
2. Meetings of the Character Identification Working Team
3. Consideration of the addition of administrative affairs standard characters
4. Addition of Standardized Characters for Registration to Standard Characters for Administrative Work

Handouts

Reference 1: Advisory Council on the Standardization of Characters in Local Government Information Systems (3rd)
Document 2 characters added Working Team Submission Form
Appendix 3: Outline of the Advisory Council on Character Standardization in Local Government Information Systems
Material 4: Establishment and Operation of Public Relations Working Team, Specialized Working Team, Character Identification Working Team, and Character Addition Working Team

Agenda

At the third meeting of the WG, the secretariat and members of the WG reported on the meetings of the Working Team of Specialists and the Working Team of Character Identification.
The secretariat explained "Study on the addition of administrative work standard characters" and "Addition of registration unified characters to administrative work standard characters".

Interpellation

Members: , I would like to invite questions and comments on agenda items 1 and 2.

Members: Specialized Working Team, I understand that the flow is to leave specific decisions to local governments in the end. I think that each local government has various past history with residents regarding non-conforming characters. I think it is good to leave it to local governments while showing certain standards such as examples of personal notification.

Members: Thank you for your opinion. What else?

Members: In relation to this matter, I understand that while the government is establishing unified standards for the identification of characters, there are also individual responses due to various circumstances.

Members: To exchange views on agenda items 3 and 4.

Members: I think it is a difficult task, including the new working team. It has been reported that it is difficult to identify the characters, but the new working team will work on it. I would like to ask about the status of submission from local governments. Have all local governments submitted it?

Depending on the local government, there may be differences in temperature and judgment depending on whether it is determined that identification is difficult or not. I think it is unavoidable because it is left to the local government, but I think there are some areas where the local government is unsure, so I wonder if there are already many inquiries.

Secretariat: It may come up in the briefing session of the . There have been inquiries from several local governments, but we are about to ask them to officially submit letters that they could not actually identify in March or later.

After listening to the opinions of various local governments, I have come to the conclusion that there are some differences in the attitude of each local government regarding identification. It is quite difficult to describe, but I think that there are two types of local governments: those that are bold in their identification, and those that are very concerned about the relationship with the residents, including minute differences, and judge that identification is quite difficult. The task of identifying characters itself is an administrative task of local governments, and unlike statutory entrusted administrative tasks, it is not a type of administrative task for the national government to establish and present criteria, and it is a form of leaving the final decision to local governments.

Members: It is certainly a matter of local government affairs, so I think it is good to respect the decisions of local governments. Since the perspective of improving the efficiency of administrative affairs is also important, I think some local governments will boldly carry out identification work. On the other hand, when it comes to submitting information that identification is difficult, the person in charge of the local government may want to know the overall situation and the trends of other local governments. Are there any plans to provide information on this?

Secretariat: It may come up in the briefing session of the local government wants to feel the atmosphere of other local governments. I presented a draft regarding the addition of characters in Document 1, and I would like to solidify the draft based on today's discussion and hold an explanatory meeting for all local governments in March to provide opportunities for Q & A and text-based information sharing.

Members: Understood. I think that there are things that local government officials may worry about, so I would like to ask for information.

Members: This is my personal impression, but I thought that the problem of letters would be more of a fuss, but it is surprisingly quiet. We may be receiving various opinions from local governments in the future. I would like to ask you to hold briefing sessions and provide information on trends.

Members: Regarding the regionality of kanji, as the expression "dialect kanji" is spreading through the media for kanji with regionality, it also exists. I think that the actual situation of such things will be clarified through this work.

Next, I have one question about the addition of unified characters for registration. It is on page 19 of Document 1. As a result of the survey that started only for the current commercial and corporate registration, it was found that 846 characters were first found. I think it will be related to the Character Addition Working Team in the future. Is there any information on the reading and character strings of the 846 characters? If you know it, you can judge whether it is a variant character or not, so please tell me.

Secretariat: It may come up in the briefing session of the In fact, since it has been used in commercial corporation registration, including examples of use and judging from the context of other characters, we have researched the reading and examples of 846 characters from, for example, data on signboards pulled from Google maps, etc., and romaji notation on websites. If there are any other details, please provide additional information.

Secretariat: It may come up in the briefing session of the Whether all readings are understood is still under investigation. Examples and character strings actually used individually are being checked. In international standardization, it is necessary to have information including the reading at the end, and we will continue the investigation.

Members: I understand. I came here because I thought that characters should be added through the Character Addition Working Team. I have been involved in the encoding of characters by the government for more than 30 years. However, when there is no information such as reading and character strings, to be honest, as a researcher, I have to rely on intuition that abandons the basis. There have been many times when the characters could not be used as character codes and the formulation of standards and identification work had to be done again from the beginning. I think that these are materials for reflection, and I think that it is only a best effort, but I would like to ask you for the future.

Secretariat: It may come up in the briefing session of the Character Addition Working Team will also report on the addition of registered unified characters.

Members: There are Chinese characters that are actually used in business. Even though there are achievements, it is said that foreign characters are not added to names, so I was wondering how to balance that. I would like to ask you to cooperate deeply with the character addition working team.

Members: There are two questions. Regarding the first question, I recognize that the unified characters for registration are basically organized by Ministry of Justice. Since this number exceeds 10,000 characters, I would like to confirm whether there were many characters related to the names of companies and corporations other than the standard characters for administrative affairs. Also, for example, land owners who are Japanese nationals or foreign nationals who have lived in Japan, who are to be registered, should basically have characters included in the standard characters for administrative affairs until now. In other words, for example, when a foreign national living in a foreign country acquires land in Japan, it is not clear whether characters other than those in the name appear in the name of the land owner. Therefore, I would be grateful if you could show me a somewhat organized list of what characters are included in the breakdown of 10,000 characters and how much it expands.

The second point is that if there is a debate about whether to add symbols or other characters in characters that local governments have determined to be unidentifiable, I would like you to work toward stopping it. There are no limits to symbols. It may lead to a debate about why this character is good and this character is bad. I am aware that this is stated in the Character Identification Procedure Manual, but I would appreciate it if you have any thoughts.

I know that we need to continue to work on the addition of characters. On the other hand, I remember with deep emotion that in the discussion last year, the number of family registers that were not revised and the number of characters derived from those that were not revised decreased significantly. In the future, for example, if there are characters in the family register that are no longer used in the family register every year, I would like to reduce the number of such characters. Including such efforts, I would like to discuss some direction, such as checking all the characters in the family register about once a year, and if they are used in the existing family register, at some point they will be removed from the set of characters. This is my hope.

Secretariat: It may come up in the briefing session of the 's registered unified characters by eliminating symbols and variant kana characters as much as possible. In fact, I think our policy is to work on those that have been properly identified as kanji characters, and I think the content of your point is exactly as it is. Thank you for your valuable opinions.

Secretariat: It may come up in the briefing session of the symbol is a character used in the address. The target of the Character Addition Working Team will be asked to identify and present characters that cannot be originally identified by name.

As for the specific future vision of the standard character set for administrative work, I do not think that it will be changed at all in the future. There may be a discussion on whether the large character set of 70000 characters will be used for a long time. As pointed out by this Advisory Panel in the past, if administrative work is usually done online on smartphones or PCs, 70000 characters cannot be displayed at all. Whether there is an opportunity to reduce the number of character sets in the future is an issue that should be considered comprehensively as more and more administrative work is done online.

Members: Since the current 70000 character set of the administrative affairs standard characters has become too large to distinguish, distinguish, read, and write, I thought it would be good to discuss this in an appropriate place and show the future direction in some way.

Members: 70000 characters Since it was an acrobatic process to reach it, I think we should be careful about adding it. Regarding the point that the idea of maintenance may become necessary in the future, I thought so. I want it to be a future issue.

Members: Currently, I think that the number of characters actually used in the family register is less than 70000 characters, but is the actual number grasped?

Secretariat: It may come up in the briefing session of the family register and characters that are actually used in the family register, but from the 1.63 million characters used in the family register, characters that can be judged to be the same were converged to create 70000 characters. I think it is stored by the local government, including characters that are deleted from the family register, but from the characters actually used in the family register, Digital Agency, in cooperation with Ministry of Justice, scrutinized them and created 70000 characters. On the other hand, as you pointed out, there are fewer characters that are specified by laws and regulations as characters that can be used in the family register.

Members: There is a limit to the number of characters that Windows can handle, and I think it is necessary to know exactly how many characters can be added in the future and how much space there is.

Secretariat: It may come up in the briefing session of the I understood that it was a font file. There are about 10,000 characters left in the font file. Regarding the family register that does not conform to the reform, it was reported at the expert meeting last year that there are more than 8000 characters in the family register that does not conform to the reform, but the current situation is that only 230 characters derived from the family register that does not conform to the reform have been reported. I thought that there would be 8000 characters because there is a possibility that the local government may have identified it in a slightly different way in various circumstances due to the relationship between the resident record and the family register, but it is not at that pace.

Regarding the characters that cannot be identified other than those in the family register that does not conform to the revision, I think that the vendor is probably creating various similar external characters, but it is assumed that the character addition working team will carefully examine and add characters in the form of a certain amount of characters. Of course, this is a part that must be done with the upper limit of the number of characters in mind. On the other hand, the current situation is that the characters derived from the family register that does not conform to the revision have not appeared at such a pace.

Members: We recognized that there is enough space and there is no problem with adding. On that basis, the principle of (I) and (ii) on page 13 of Document 1 seems to be expressed that they will be added if they receive a notification from the local government, and I think that the local government side may understand that it will be approved if it receives a notification. Is this recognition correct?

Secretariat: It may come up in the briefing session of the Even if the characters cannot be identified, as shown on page 14 of Document 1, we will carefully check the status of the use of the characters in local governments. If there are characters in the actual system that exist as characters but are not used, we will not approve them and they will not be subject to the addition of characters. We believe that the biggest problem is that if we continue to leave them as non-Japanese characters, local government systems will be disrupted due to information coordination, etc., and residents' services will be delayed. Our policy is to basically approve if we receive a report that we cannot identify the characters and use the characters.

Members: After all, I think that characters are public goods. If you add characters that are suspected by many people of writing errors or characters that seem to be due to personal circumstances or convenience, if it is registered as an international standard, it will continue to be used for 100 or 200 years, and it will become a historical heritage. Considering this, I think it is necessary to be very careful about registering anything if it is reported.

On the other hand, if it is not registered, it will affect the work of local governments. For example, we are concerned that it will be difficult to fulfill our accountability to future generations unless we consider measures such as separating the area to be officially registered and the area to be temporarily registered, or registering characters that have no reason in the area of external characters, which is said to be not very good.

Secretariat: It may come up in the briefing session of the document 1, the original purpose of standard characters for administrative work is to create character sets that facilitate collaboration between systems and that do not hinder services due to poor collaboration caused by the presence of user-defined characters. There is a major premise that the purpose is not to create characters that can be used in systems. The question is whether to add all the characters that have actually acquired citizenship and those that may have been miswritten. Regarding the latter, i.e., characters that may have been miswritten, I believe that leaving them in user-defined characters would cause more problems in terms of information coordination, and I have presented a proposal that they be added in this way. On the other hand, with regard to international standardization efforts, Digital Agency and the Government of Japan do not have the authority to propose international standardization of all characters to be added, and the decision is made by another organization. It is not that all standard characters for administrative work can be subject to international standardization. The decision is made from the perspective of whether they can be said to be characters or not within the concept of international standardization. It is not that they are provisional registrations or additions, but among the character sets created for information coordination in the form of standard characters for administrative work, it is naturally possible that some will be internationally standardized and some will not.

Members: Is it correct to understand that there are characters that are registered as international standards and characters that are used as administrative standard characters but do not become international standards?

Secretariat: It may come up in the briefing session of the At the moment, we are in the process of scrutinizing the characters, so I cannot comment on the quantity, but there is a possibility that there are characters in the administrative standard characters that do not fall under the criteria of international standardization, that is, characters that cannot be international standard characters.

Members: Is it correct to understand that the international standard characters that can be sufficiently explained and should be registered as characters are registered, and other characters are registered in the sections to be provisionally registered?

Secretariat: It may come up in the briefing session of the The so-called GJ administrative standard characters, which are now being added as something other than MJs, are being managed in the private domain of the PUA. If they become international standards, I think they will move to the official domain. For characters that cannot become international standards, coordination with international organizations is necessary and Digital Agency cannot say anything definite, but characters that do not move to the public domain are naturally possible. In terms of international standards, I think they will be divided into two.

Members: Regarding page 13 of Document 1, when it is said, "What has been reported by the local government as what is actually used in administrative practices, etc.", it is good that something like local special circumstances come up, but I feel that it is a problem if something that has come up due to personal circumstances passes. It is important to scrutinize what has been reported based on what criteria. On page 14, it is said that the status of utilization of the relevant characters should be confirmed, but I thought it was necessary to carefully confirm various circumstances, such as confirming the status of such utilization.

Secretariat: It may come up in the briefing session of the As mentioned in Document 2, we asked in the notification about the circumstances in which identification was not possible at the time of the notification of the non-conforming family register. It is not that we will judge only from that, but we would like to grasp under what circumstances the identification became difficult at the local government side.

Members: It seems that there are concerns about international standardization, but I have been involved in ISO's kanji standardization in the past, and at international conferences, characters needed in various areas such as administration and literature from various countries appeared. Now, each character is strictly examined, and for example, if the shape is similar, there is a unification rule, and existing character codes are used by unifying them, in other words, they are not adopted. Or, depending on the usage situation, they are not included in the international standards as characters based on the usage results. I am not personally concerned about that.

Members: Thank you for your helpful information.

Members: Secretariat, it was explained that it was planned to basically add new characters for those that were reported to be difficult to identify. However, there are differences among local governments, and it has been said that some local governments will actively promote identification and others will not. Therefore, even if there are reports, I would like you to carefully consider whether to really add or not. I also think that it would be better to properly explain this at the briefing session to local governments.

Members: On page 13 of Document 1, when identifying or adding new external characters derived from non-conforming family registers, I think it is necessary to consider the rules for related work, such as whether or not to use the added administrative standard characters for display in the current family register system. Is it necessary to decide whether to manage non-conforming family registers on paper and not to use administrative office standard characters on the family register system? I thought it was necessary to decide whether to use administrative office standard characters when linking information with other systems.

Secretariat: It may come up in the briefing session of the reform Characters that could not be identified in the non-conforming family register are shared with Ministry of Justice, and we are also sharing the fact that they will be added to the administrative work standard characters this time. On the other hand, whether or not a character can be used in a family register is a decision to be made in Ministry of Justice's family register laws and regulations system, and we would like to cooperate so that Ministry of Justice can make a decision while sharing information.

Members: I would like to state the current view of non-conforming family registers. Since an additional resolution was passed in the Diet to fully consider and respond to the feelings of citizens who are attached to the characters already on the family register, non-conforming family registers are being managed on paper, and it is considered difficult to immediately replace them with other characters and manage them on a system at present.

Members: Do you have any other questions or opinions?

Members: identification schedule is very tight. Are there any requests regarding the identification deadline from the local governments that have the Specific Migration Support System?

Secretariat: It may come up in the briefing session of the local government, but at present there is no request to postpone character identification because it is a specific transfer support system. On the other hand, if the character identification deadline is postponed until just before the deadline for specific line support, there is an inherent risk later. I think that the character identification work can be done in parallel with the transition of the system in a sense, and I would like to present it in this form and hear the opinions of local governments.

Members: All right. If we can extract the characters, we will probably be able to identify them, so considering the later schedule, I think this date will be the last minute. In addition, many of the members of the Add Characters Working Team are familiar with local governments, so I don't think there will be any problems, but I would be grateful if they could proceed while listening to the opinions of local governments as necessary.

Members: This is the end of the exchange of opinions. I would like to thank all of you for your valuable opinions. The Conference accepts the draft proposal to add characters to the standard characters for administrative affairs as a draft. The Secretariat is requested to finalize the policy after providing careful explanations to local governments, etc. based on today's discussion.

Greater than or