Amendments and Endorsements page on Japanese Passport Changes

The Amendments and Endorsements page of
an American passport is in the back. In
a Japanese passport, it is in the front.

In a previous post, our contributors documented how to add your pre-naturalized name to a Japanese passport after it has been issued. This is still possible, but the Ministry of Foreign Affairs has changed its policy so that if somebody changes critical information on the first page of their passport, they now issue an entirely new passport rather than note the change on this special page as our previous post illustrated.

The new protocol became effective March 20th, 2014. Changing the following things on the first page will now require the issuing of a new passport:

• Your Japanese family and given names, transliterated into alphabet
• Your alternate alphabet names in parentheses, if any
• Your Japanese registered domicile
• Your sex
• Your birth date

Note that in some changes, changes to your Japanese Register may not necessitate needing a new passport:

• If the 漢字 {kanji} (Japanese sinograms) of your name changes, but the ローマ字 {rōmaji} (alphabetic transliteration) remains the same, there is no need. The reason for this is that unlike some passports (for example, Taiwanese passports), Japanese passports do not record the legal 漢字 {kanji} (sinogram) names of its nationals; they merely record the more ambiguous ヘボン式 {Hebon-shiki} (Hepburn style) representation for overseas use.
  
  Example: changing your family name from 齊藤 {SAITŌ}, which is 旧字体 {kyūjitai} (old Japanese sinograms) to 斉藤 {SAITŌ}, which is the same name but the first glyph is in 新字体 {shinjitai} (new Japanese sinogram) form, does not require issuing a new passport. On the other hand, changing the passport's printed transliteration from "SAITO" to "SAITOH" (an alternative form of transliteration/translation) would require a new passport.
• If your 本籍 {honseki} (registered [Japanese] domicile) changes, but the prefecture (都道府県 {todōfuken}) stays the same, you do not need to have a new passport issued. The reason for this is that the registered domicile information on the passport, both printed on page one and inside the chip, is only listed up to the prefectural level.
  
  Example: if your registered domicile changes from 大阪府大阪市 {Ōsaka-fu Ōsaka-shi} (Osaka City, Osaka Prefecture) to 大阪府吹田市 {Ōsaka-fu Suita-shi} (Suita City, Osaka Prefecture), no passport update is necessary.

The reason for the change of policy is to reduce the risk of the information getting overlooked or input incorrectly during entrance or exit from a country. The CIQ officials working the immigration halls of busy hub airports may process tens of thousands of international passengers per day. They rely on the automation provided by the machine readable passport for fast & accurate entry of information: they use OCR technology to read the two lines of monospaced font data at the bottom on the MRP, which is then used as a passkey to decrypt the information in the RFID contact-less chip in the e-Passport which gets the government crypto-signed digital photo programmed stored inside it.

If the data is changed in analog on a separate page, this slows down the data entry process, and increases the chance of error: an official may overlook the additional special page or forget to update what is displayed on their data terminal.

Why not just update the chip along with the Amendments & Endorsements Page?

For security reasons, the data inside a passport chip can only be crypto-signed and written to its storage exactly once during its instantiation. Once the chip is programmed, the data payload cannot be changed, deleted, amended, or erased.

Do you need a new passport if you change, add, delete an "alternate name"?

Japanese passports have a special feature called "alternate names". Although legal Japanese names for Japanese nationals (excluding royalty) are always exactly one family name and one given name, of arbitrary length but rarely more than three characters each, of almost any arbitrary combination of approved sinograms and Japanese syllabet. Additionally, just because a Japanese name is transliterated a certain way in a passport doesn't mean it's one's "official" alphabet rendition of their Japanese name. Alphabetic transliterations are a one-way lossy translation where one name can be written multiple ways, with all of them being considered passably correct.

There are many reasons for alternate names (for example, if a Japanese person uses other names or alias for convenience, professional or family reasons, overseas), which is why a Japanese person, male or female, may have multiple names in parenthesis, separated by solidus characters, by the alphabetic family and given name. Often times Japanese who marry non-Japanese will keep separate surnames for use in Japan because the foreign name is too unwieldy for use by Japanese-language-only people and information technology, yet they will use their "foreign name" for overseas use for the exact same reason.

Note how the Surname has a name, "(HAVILL)",
that is not in the top line of the
Machine Readable Zone: "P<JPNINOUE<<EIDO…".

However, these names are semi-official and of an "informative nature" only in that they're not designed to be automatically recorded by passport scanning equipment: the alternate names are neither recorded inside the RFID chip nor the MRZ of the passport. So even though it may say "INOUE(HAVILL)" as your family name on a Japanese passport, the immigration official will only see "INOUE" on their monitor after scanning the passport and that is the only name that will be recorded — unless the official manually edits it or adds a note/comment to the embarkation/debarkation database record.

Nevertheless, the 外務省 {gaimushō} (MoFA) still requires the issuing of a new passport even though the parts of password that read by computers will not change, regardless of whether it is a five (5) year or ten (10) year passport. This is because of the potential for a human to overlook the Amendments & Endorsements page, and the alternate names may be of use to overseas inspectors.

And unfortunately, the issuing of a new passport is not free, and it will require a new recent photo.