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SPEAKER_02: The Tokyo rail and metro systems make up one of the largest rapid transit networks in the world. More than 14 billion people walk through its turnstiles every year. That's about 40 million rides every single day. On a typical morning during rush hour, commuters stand cheek to jowl in crammed train carriages. The busiest stations even employ people pushers known as Ocea who make sure everyone is packed in before the doors close. But last year, at the start of the COVID epidemic, after the Japanese government declared a state of emergency, the trains emptied out.
SPEAKER_04: That's Tokyo-based producer Daniel Simo.
SPEAKER_02: Suddenly, there were no Ocea to be seen.
SPEAKER_04: In fact, the trains were so empty in the mornings that if you had to take one, there was no need to stand anymore. For a few weeks at least, most people had stopped riding the train. Most, but not all.
SPEAKER_06: It was kind of strange because everybody was supposed to stay at home, but I had to go out every single day.
SPEAKER_04: That's Miho Tanaka. She's not a health professional or an essential worker. She runs a company in Tokyo that helps foreign businesses set up in Japan. And yet, at the height of the pandemic, she still found herself commuting on a daily basis. And not just in the metro, and not just to one place.
SPEAKER_06: So during the COVID, my day looked like visiting the office in the morning, then take a train, then taking a bus, then go to another office. So I was a bit scared at the time.
SPEAKER_02: But despite the obvious danger, Miho Tanaka had no choice. She was beholden to an old Japanese custom.
SPEAKER_06: Just because every single time I had to stamp some documents with hanko.
SPEAKER_02: Hanko, or in shō as they're sometimes called, are the carved stamp seals that people in Japan often use in place of signatures. Hanko seals are made from materials ranging from plastic to jade, and are about the size of a tube of lipstick.
SPEAKER_04: The end of each hanko is etched with its owner's name, usually in the kanji pictorial characters used in Japanese writing. This carved end is then dipped in red cinnabar paste and impressed on a document as a form of identification. Hanko seals work like signatures, only instead of signing on a dotted line, you impress your hanko on a small circle to prove your identity.
SPEAKER_04: But unlike a signature, which you can make with any old pen or touchscreen, in Japan you need to have your own personal hanko with you whenever you stamp something. And you have to stamp it in person.
SPEAKER_02: And there is a lot that needs stamping. Just ask Miho.
SPEAKER_06: For example, on Monday I visit the tax office, on Tuesday I visit the bank, on Wednesday I visit the legal affairs bureau, and I brought hanko every single time to stamp some different documents for different procedures.
SPEAKER_02: To sign for a package, you need a hanko. To clock in and out of work, you need a hanko. To finalize business contracts, you need a hanko.
SPEAKER_04: And there is not just one kind of hanko. No, that would be too easy.
SPEAKER_04: You might have one cheap hanko you carry in your bag every day, and another fancy one stored in a safe deposit box that you might only use once or twice in your life. Miho's job involves a lot of paperwork at government offices, so she often has to use different hanko for herself and her clients.
SPEAKER_06: I have my personal hanko plus company hanko, and when I have to do some procedures in a bank, then I have to bring a hanko for bank.
SPEAKER_04: And do you ever get confused, or you take the wrong one, for example? Always. Yeah, always.
SPEAKER_02: And Miho is not the only one stuck endlessly running around with their hanko. Last March, in the midst of the pandemic, even as everyone was being encouraged to work from home, many people in Japan still needed to do a lot of paperwork. For some, that meant getting on a train and traveling halfway across the city just to stamp a single document. Like a lot of people, I often find hanko beautiful.
SPEAKER_04: Not just the kanji characters or the physical seals themselves. There's also just something undeniably cool about the act of impressing a hanko onto a document. It's one of the small traditions that makes Japan, Japan. But even most Japanese have gotten to the point where they're fed up with the whole hanko system. So how did Japan get here then? Two decades into the 21st century, why do the Japanese still need to use this ancient analog thing? Because hanko didn't used to be everywhere in Japan.
SPEAKER_02: In fact, they weren't even originally Japanese.
SPEAKER_11: The earliest seal that is known to have gone from China to Japan dates to, I think, the year 57 AD. And that apparently was given by the Chinese emperor. That's Philip Hu, curator of Asian art at the St. Louis Art Museum and an expert in East Asian seals.
SPEAKER_11: And interestingly, it was a golden seal. It was a seal made of solid gold. Hu says the earliest hanko were status symbols used by the likes of emperors, court officials and samurai.
SPEAKER_04: They were made of materials like soapstone and jade and were engraved using seal script, a form of calligraphic writing. But they were not the kind of thing you saw every day.
SPEAKER_11: Seals were very much part of the imperial and civil bureaucracy of Japan. But at that time, not popular amongst ordinary people.
SPEAKER_04: That's because for much of Japan's history, most ordinary people only had given names or what in the West might be called first names. If you did have a surname, it was usually shared with your entire community. Only members of the feudal aristocracy had the kind of specific family names that you might put on a hanko. And starting in the 1600s, Japan's shogun rulers imposed a policy of strict international isolation, cutting Japan off from the rest of the world and effectively preserving this feudal system.
SPEAKER_02: So even as late as the 19th century, most people in Japan didn't really use seals or need them. But things would soon change, thanks in part to Matthew Perry.
SPEAKER_04: No, not that Matthew Perry.
SPEAKER_09: So in 1853, Commodore Matthew Perry, who shares the same name with the Friends actor, he shows up with four modern US naval warships and basically forces Japan to open back up. Nick Kapoor is a professor of Japanese history at Rutgers University.
SPEAKER_04: And this has a huge impact. It's kind of difficult to overstate just how much society changed.
SPEAKER_04: The arrival of Perry's fleet kicked off a period known as the Meiji Restoration, in which Japan transformed itself into a modern, industrialized nation state. The old feudal system of the shogunate was done away with and replaced with a centralized state bureaucracy, which proceeded to change almost everything about how society was structured.
SPEAKER_09: They passed a land reform, they instituted free public schooling, they instituted mandatory conscription, they created a modern military.
SPEAKER_02: But in order to do any of that effectively, the new bureaucratic regime needed to make one additional change. Everyone in Japan would have to choose surnames.
SPEAKER_04: In the old feudal system, there hadn't been any need for most people to possess distinct names, but the Japanese state now wanted to keep much closer track of who was who. So in 1875, a law was passed requiring every citizen to register a family name. Those who were too slow in claiming a surname could even be penalized.
SPEAKER_02: And in the mad dash that followed, some people just made names up, usually by smashing together words and syllables that had never been combined before.
SPEAKER_09: So as a result of this, you know, sometimes even illiterate farmers just came up with crazy surnames.
SPEAKER_04: Even today in Japan, you can find families with names like Cat House, Cow Poop, or simply the number 735.
SPEAKER_02: My personal favorite surname has to be God. That's it. Just God. I'm Joe God.
SPEAKER_09: And so Japan has maybe the largest variety of surnames of any country per capita.
SPEAKER_02: But it wasn't enough that everyone have their own unique-ish name. In this new modern Japan, everyone now also needed their own Hanko.
SPEAKER_11: So the introduction of seals for everyday use by ordinary citizens was by design. It didn't happen organically. It was more or less by decree. Suddenly, Hanko went from rarefied status symbols to something that almost everyone had because they had to.
SPEAKER_04: And soon, seal manufacturing became its own major industry. You would actually employ a seal carver. These were specialized vendors and all they did pretty much was carve seals for other people.
SPEAKER_04: Some carvers had large workshops. Others were itinerant street vendors who made their way from town to town. And you know, whenever the carver came by your village or your town and you needed a seal, you would immediately employ them before they moved on to another place.
SPEAKER_11: Eventually, there came to be three different types of Hanko, depending on the context.
SPEAKER_02: The regular everyday Hanko was called a metomian. Everybody has one, okay, in their sort of little bag or whatever they carry around because it's so often required for you to just indicate that a transaction has taken place.
SPEAKER_11: There was also another type of personal seal used for banking called a ginko-in.
SPEAKER_02: You might need one of these to make a deposit or transfer at your local branch.
SPEAKER_04: And then there was the jitsu-in, which in English means a person's actual seal or their real seal. And a jitsu-in is basically a proxy for the person.
SPEAKER_11: Jitsu-in were not used very frequently, but instead reserved for the most important kinds of documents in a person's life, like mortgages and marriage certificates.
SPEAKER_02: It was kind of like having a social security number if your social security number could only be written down in one place and had immense sentimental value.
SPEAKER_04: Even today, families will have fancy jitsu-in made for their children when they come of age and then store them in a deposit box for safekeeping.
SPEAKER_11: Because it's basically saying that I am the person buying a house or I am the person that's marrying you. And so it's very, very personal. In time, almost every element of government, business and social life was systematized and put onto paper, usually stamped with one of these three hanko.
SPEAKER_02: But hanko would come to play an even more visible role in Japanese life in the 20th century, thanks to a business practice called nemawashi.
SPEAKER_04: Nemawashi is a very important consensus building procedure.
SPEAKER_04: Takao Kawasaki is a retired consultant who worked for 40 years for a large Japanese glass manufacturer. And he says that building consensus through nemawashi means laying the groundwork for any big decision by lobbying and consulting with everyone involved prior to moving forward.
SPEAKER_02: That means if you have an idea, you have to first approach all those concerned one by one, discuss your plan and get buy in from each of them individually.
SPEAKER_04: This is done before any larger meeting. So I have to repeat five, six or even seven times repeat the same explanation to every person to get his okay.
SPEAKER_10: And this is where hanko comes in.
SPEAKER_04: Because as you move through the company, from the lowest ranks to the highest, once someone understands and agrees with your idea, they get out their seal. Then everybody trace the hanko and sell a whole bunch of hankos around each company document.
SPEAKER_10: That document full of hanko stamps is called a ringi.
SPEAKER_02: And if you look at all the stamps around the ringi, there's a sort of implicit code you can decipher, which tells you about things like a company's hierarchy.
SPEAKER_04: Bottom is lower rank, top is the higher rank. And if you reach the department head that levels your hanko getting a little bigger.
SPEAKER_10: So when you see the size of the hanko, you can make a fair guess is what sort of a level that person is in the organization. And naturally, the CEO's hanko is the biggest. Although if you really want to go big, be sure to Google the emperor seal.
SPEAKER_02: It's roughly the size of a pro wrestler's fist. It uses a special ink. It's made of solid gold, and it weighs 10 pounds.
SPEAKER_04: Even the exact angle of a stamp on a document can reveal something about the person's place in the power structure. A CEO's seal, for example, might be affixed perfectly straight up and down with the top of the seal at 12 o'clock, while the top lieutenant seals would be slightly rotated. Middle management would be angled just a bit further and so on down the line, with each seal paying deference to those above it. Funny thing though, occasionally one stubborn person may not completely agree.
SPEAKER_02: In which case, they might still sign off on the plan, but in order to signal that they weren't really totally on board, deliberately they'd angle their stamp just a little too far. And he placed the hanko 45 degrees turn.
SPEAKER_04: Once finished, his hanko strewn document is a sign that everyone had been consulted and brought in on the latest plan.
SPEAKER_10: It takes time, a hell of a lot, yes. But by the time the final decision is made, everybody is in the same wavelength, same direction, same goal. So they boom, go, without hesitating.
SPEAKER_04: For a long time, nemawashi was simply how business worked in Japan. There was a culture of consensus, in which everyone at a company took on risks and rewards together, and it was often credited with Japan's incredible economic growth in the mid 20th century. And as nemawashi's most visible symbol, the use of the hanko went unquestioned. But that would start to change in the 1990s.
SPEAKER_02: Well these GDP figures are very bad, much worse than was expected, and in fact one analyst here in Tokyo today called them worse than disastrous.
SPEAKER_00: An entire period 1998 to 2003 was basically a period of recession and depression. It really hit Japan hard.
SPEAKER_08: Ulrika Shader is a professor of Japanese business at the University of California, San Diego.
SPEAKER_04: And she says that Japan's recession in the 90s and early 2000s was so bad that the period would come to be referred to as the country's lost decade.
SPEAKER_08: And if you look at even at societal measures like robberies and break-ins, or other signs of social distress like divorce rates, everything went up. So those were really dark days.
SPEAKER_02: And that widespread anxiety had a profound effect on the practice of nemawashi and the hanko system, because it had been easy enough to stamp your approval on a business plan during the boom years, when most plans worked.
SPEAKER_08: People might have said, yeah sure that's fine, you know, even skipped some steps, they say yeah sure, if we can produce it we can sell it, let's go go go.
SPEAKER_04: But once the economy spiraled and the risks of stamping your hanko on something multiplied...
SPEAKER_08: Suddenly everything becomes much more complicated because people say no, I don't want to sign this, or I need to get hand-holding before I agree to this, or I need something in return for agreeing to this. So the metabolism of the companies slowed down. And this is the word that the Japanese used to describe this. They actually think that the metabolism of the entire economy slowed down. And if that wasn't bad enough, this all happened at the same time that the internet was taking off.
SPEAKER_04: And a tradition requiring people to stamp paper documents using special seals to be physically carried on their person at all times, well, it hasn't exactly proved internet friendly.
SPEAKER_02: If anything, the hanko has shackled Japan to the old paper system. It really is quite amazing how much paper documents rule the day in Japan, because of the hanko.
SPEAKER_09: Nick Kapoor says that the need to physically stamp things disincentivizes people from ever digitizing documents, since it's only a matter of time until you have to print any given document back out, just so it can be stamped.
SPEAKER_04: And everything shuts down until somebody can get into the office and get this hanko out of a drawer.
SPEAKER_09: Work orders, expense reports, any kind of official company communication, they all need to be in hard copy and certified with a stamp in person.
SPEAKER_02: When you go to the bank, when you go to any official something, even receiving the package from personal service, they usually prefer the hanko as a receipt.
SPEAKER_10: And the fax machine, I mean, people have commented on this a lot, but paper faxes are still the only way to get things done because everything requires a paper document that you can stamp on.
SPEAKER_09: Miho Tanaka remembers experiencing this kind of friction firsthand at her last job, waiting around the office for her boss to stamp a document that could just as easily be signed online, nearly anywhere else.
SPEAKER_04: Also, I cannot usually ask the other people to put the hanko on behalf of somebody else. And usually on one paper, like five people have to put stamp. So yeah, that's very time consuming for everybody.
SPEAKER_02: When things like PDFs and digital signatures first appeared in the 1990s, many people in Japan expected that a digital transformation was just around the corner, but it never really happened. And ironically, that is in part because of the slowness of Nemawashi and the hanko system. Like literally the rules are so strict that there's just no way around that unless you change all these rules and that requires all these meetings and discussion and then people have to sign off on it, probably with a hanko.
SPEAKER_04: But lately, it seems as if the cultural tide may have finally turned. Some large Japanese corporations have been quietly retiring their hanko in recent years, and a younger generation of Japanese people like Miho, who have no memory of the pre-internet boom years, are using hanko less and clicking boxes more.
SPEAKER_06: For example, my parents age like 50, 60. They think hanko is so important, but I think young generation wants to change asap because we all get used to smartphone signature process just like the other Western countries. And now the same state bureaucracy that created the modern hanko system might have no choice but to kill it.
SPEAKER_02: Japan has declared a nationwide emergency as Covid-19 infections exceed 9,000.
SPEAKER_12: Medical experts have urged the government to take drastic countermeasures as quickly as possible to slow the contagion. Residents are being told to stay home to help stem the outbreak.
SPEAKER_01: There's increasing pressure to take stronger measures, including a total lockdown of the capital.
SPEAKER_04: When Covid first hit, there was a sense that Japan would be spared the worst of it and could keep doing business as normal. But that didn't last long. Instead, the Covid pandemic finally did what years of bureaucratic stagnation could not.
SPEAKER_02: Stories like Miho's of hanko procedures forcing people to brave train cars in the middle of a lockdown have finally spurred the government to act.
SPEAKER_04: In May 2021, the administration of Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga enacted a set of laws establishing a new agency to speed up the process of digitization. This involved getting rid of hanko for almost all government procedures. Many believe this government move is a watershed moment, including Ulrika Shada.
SPEAKER_02: Once it has no longer legal standing, I don't see how it can remain important in day-to-day life.
SPEAKER_08: It's a little bit sad actually, but if there is no purpose to it, then people will happily let go. Well, of course it's a tradition, but tradition can be killed.
SPEAKER_10: Takao Kawasaki is a creature of the hanko happy boom years if there ever was one.
SPEAKER_04: But he also no longer really sees the benefit of the seal system. To me, I'm rather old man, but the radical old man, I don't care.
SPEAKER_10: Because American business, European business, you know, have done the business for many, many years without hanko. Why can't we? Just matter of change. You matter of accept.
SPEAKER_04: Still, there have been some who want to hold on to the old ways. They worry that an end to hanko also marks an end to the country's culture of consensus and shared responsibility in favor of a more western model based on individual accomplishment. One prefectural assembly has officially opposed the government move to phase out hanko.
SPEAKER_02: Another group of lawmakers in the national parliament recently formed a coalition to preserve them, kind of like a seal appreciation caucus.
SPEAKER_04: And in fact, a lot of people I spoke with, even if they recognize the practical need to phase it out for most situations, hope the hanko won't disappear completely. Philip Hu concedes that maybe there shouldn't be three types of hanko anymore, but can't we at least keep one? He points to the jitsu-in in particular, the real seal, the one that's only pulled out for the really big stuff.
SPEAKER_11: I mean, I think it's nice. I think the jitsu-in is not such a bad idea to have some kind of personal ceremony to mark a decision of considerable importance in your life. Even Takao Kawasaki has a soft spot for the real seal. He says he fondly remembers using a jitsu-in when he bought his first home.
SPEAKER_02: My father made my jitsu-in when I got married and gave it to me. I still use it. And then my son was married.
SPEAKER_10: Same way I made it and gave it to him. Yeah.
SPEAKER_02: A marriage, a birth, buying a house. These things are worth a pause and perhaps a moment of ritual.
SPEAKER_04: I'm going to make a living! I'm going to make a living! On the edge of the entertainment and shopping area of Shinjuku in western Tokyo, there is a small Buddhist temple dedicated to Bishamonten, one of the seven lucky gods of Japanese folklore. This past October, a priest knelt by the temple's altar, rang a bell bell and chanted a sutra behind a plastic face shield. He was performing a memorial service for a batch of about 50 hanko brought to the temple by a group of nearby office workers.
SPEAKER_02: It's not uncommon for inanimate objects to receive funeral rites in Japan. They're a way to bid farewell and commemorate items that have served their purpose and are no longer needed, like scissors, sewing needles, and hanko. In fact, October 1st is seal day, when hanko shops throughout the country hold memorial services for old, retired seals.
SPEAKER_04: But at the temple in Shinjuku, there was a distinct sense that this funeral was different. It was a fact that this time, it wasn't only these individual hanko to which Japan was saying goodbye.
SPEAKER_02: This story was produced by Daniel Simo and edited by Joe Rosenberg. When we come back, we'll talk to Daniel about a more problematic tradition involving hanko, which Japan is also struggling to bring to an end. After this.
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SPEAKER_04: I heard a lot about traditions in my reporting and they can often grow in quite an organic way, but sometimes it seems like they can just be fabricated. Right. Because we're like in your story, like it was clear that Honko was a little bit of both because it had this really old aristocratic provenance stemming from China.
SPEAKER_02: But the current sort of use of Honko is really something that's like much more recent and much more designed, concocted for the present day. Yeah, exactly. And it turns out there's another supposedly ancient quote unquote tradition involving Honko that's even more of a flat out just invention.
SPEAKER_04: And it starts with this guy named Hikaru Sakamoto, who was a traveling salesman from the prefecture of Yamanashi. Oh, I like a good traveling salesman story. Okay. So what is it?
SPEAKER_02: Well, back in the 1960s, Sakamoto, the salesman, he was going around Yamanashi selling jewelry to mostly wealthy customers.
SPEAKER_04: And this is when the economic boom that was happening in the 60s was at his just most boomtastic. And people suddenly had a lot more money to spend. So he went into their homes and he looked around and he noticed that they were making all these big expensive purchases. But when it came to Honko, they were still using all these cheap wooden ones that were very common at the time. So, you know, like any good salesman, he saw an opportunity. So he saw all these cheap Honko and he was like, oh, I can really upsell this market into something fancier.
SPEAKER_02: Yeah. So he decided to make and market a new type of luxury Honko made out of a material that was mostly being used for things like pipes and cigarette filters at the time.
SPEAKER_04: And it was ivory. So he started a company in 1967 and he began to market heavily to department stores and through mail order catalogs and door to door sales. And I should be clear, he wasn't the first one to make Honko out of ivory, but he was definitely a visionary as far as the marketing goes.
SPEAKER_02: So what was his marketing like?
SPEAKER_04: Well, he put up ads on newspapers and magazines with pictures and drawings of elephants next to some really purple pros that portrayed elephants as these sacred animals. Take this newspaper ad, for example. Okay. So this is a very busy ad with an elephant dead center in the middle, you know, and these little Honko sets that are like kind of beautifully displayed.
SPEAKER_02: Yeah. And if you look on the left, actually, there's a pack of two.
SPEAKER_04: And the one on the left is it says it's a Jitsu Inn, which is the real seal. And the one on the right is the Ginkgo Inn, which is the bank seal. So you can get your set of, you know, ivory for all your needs. They're right next to each other. So what is the all the ad copy? Because it's very dense with ad copies. What does the ad copy say?
SPEAKER_02: Well, basically, it's really talking up the elephant angle.
SPEAKER_04: And it's saying that because elephants live long lives in tight family groups, that people with ivory Honkos will also enjoy long lives with good fortune. And this advertisement said Elephant Ivory is the best Honko material combining fortune, elegance, comfortable usage and durability.
SPEAKER_04: That's Masayuki Sakamoto. No relation to our traveling salesman. Masayuki is a lawyer and environmental activist with the Japan Tiger and Elephant Fund. Here's him reading the rest of the ad.
SPEAKER_07: Elephant Ivory since ancient times is a protector against evil and symbol of prosperity because elephants are not only the world's largest animal, but also the one making harmonious family.
SPEAKER_02: So is Sakamoto here like the salesman, Sakamoto? Is he tapping into some actual Japanese tradition here or is he just sort of making this stuff up?
SPEAKER_04: You mean, is it is ivory traditionally considered a lucky charm combining fortune and elegance and all that? Right, right, right. No, no. He just made that up. So if this is if he's sort of making this up whole cloth, I mean, like, how successful was this?
SPEAKER_02:
SPEAKER_04: It was hugely successful. I've heard the ads described as the Japanese equivalent of the Diamonds Are Forever ad campaign. Oh, yeah. And soon other companies were copying these methods and ivory hankos just became this hot new luxury good. And just how it only took a generation really to convince people in the West that diamond engagement rings were this age old practice. In Japan, consumers really quickly bought into this idea that if you were going to get yourself a good proper hanko, it should be made out of ivory. So just like that, you had a new tradition being created. So it's like a new tradition, even on kind of a new tradition, like all of it's pretty recent in the history of Japan.
SPEAKER_04: Oh, yeah, yeah, that's right. And then the demand for ivory just grew and grew throughout the 70s and 80s. And Masayuki Sakamoto says that Japan became the largest ivory importer in the world. And 80 percent of the low ivory was processed into hanko.
SPEAKER_03: If you say 80 percent of that ivory, like how many hankos could that be?
SPEAKER_07: There is not enough information, but one document said in 1980 about two million hanko was produced in one year. Two million hanko a year?
SPEAKER_02: I had no idea that would be the amount. I mean, and then also, like now that you mentioned this ivory part of it, that is a horrifying number. I mean, like how many elephants had to die to like feed this sort of fancy hanko habit? Well, there was a report released in 2018 by the Environmental Investigation Agency, which estimated that since 1970, more than 260,000 elephants had been killed to supply Japan with ivory.
SPEAKER_04: And again, most of that ivory was just going into making hanko. And in the 1980s, elephant numbers dropped so much that there was a big international push to ban the trade of ivory, which eventually led to the ratification in 1989 of the ivory ban through something called CITES, which was the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species. But the thing is, even though there was a ban, it didn't necessarily have the full desired effect. Because remember the ad that I showed you earlier? That was from 1998.
SPEAKER_02: Whoa. So you said that the ban was in 89. So this is nine years later. So they're advertising that they have a fantastic ivory hanko in an ad nine years after the ban. Yeah, yeah, that's right.
SPEAKER_04: And the reason for that is simple. In reality, just import is prohibited, but selling and buying is free in Japan. So it's still legal in Japan.
SPEAKER_02: Oh, so you can't import any more ivory into the country, but all the ivory that was there in Japan before the ban, that can be turned into hanko and purchased and sold and all until it runs out. Yeah, exactly. And on top of that, Japan lobbied successfully for there to be two final shipments of ivory after the ban.
SPEAKER_04: So there was one in 1997 and one and this one, like China also got in on this one in 2008. And that ivory is still being used. Wow. So are they almost out of ivory? I mean, is this the end of ivory in Japan?
SPEAKER_02: Like if I walked into a hanko shop today, could I buy an ivory hanko? For the most part, yeah. It's not advertised as heavily as it used to be. And some shops might just refuse to sell it, but it is available.
SPEAKER_04: And if you really want to, you can still get your ivory seal. Even now, anyone can buy ivory very openly. The regulation is just when you buy a whole tusk, you have to get the registration in advance.
SPEAKER_07: But if registered ivory tusks, you can buy freely.
SPEAKER_02: Oh my God, you can buy an ivory tusk? This doesn't seem like a ban at all.
SPEAKER_04: Yeah, it's kind of crazy. And one concern with all this is that because there is still a legal domestic trade for ivory, some people worry that whenever you have a legal trade in something, that this continues to feed the illegal trade going into the country. Totally. I mean, because people could still hypothetically smuggle ivory into the country illegally. And, you know, it's like laundered by the time it enters into retail. You could just say, oh, this came from, you know, before 2008 or the last shipment.
SPEAKER_02: I mean, is there a notion from your experts that the legal part of this trade is feeding the illegal import of ivory still? Yeah, there is. And especially because the regulations are so lax in a way. It's mostly, you know, the only thing you have to register is that whole tusk. But as soon as you cut a tusk in two, you don't have to register it.
SPEAKER_04: Wow. Yeah. I should say, though, there has been more and more pressure building in the last decade or so. And two of the main online retailers now here in Japan, Yahoo and Rakuten, have actually banned sales of ivory on their platforms. And a lot of socially conscious Japanese consumers actually might feel a little conflicted about buying ivory now. And, you know, actually, the Tokyo Olympics, which are starting very soon, was supposed to be a big turning point for this because anti-ivory campaigners were hoping that holding a large international event in Japan would help to shine a light on the problem. You know, people coming from all over the world, many of whom might want to buy a, you know, a traditional souvenir while they're in town.
SPEAKER_04: Like they can pick up their own honko. Yeah, exactly. So they were hoping that that kind of scrutiny might force the Japanese government to once and for all ban the sale of ivory. So they were imagining the scenario of the Olympics and all these international tourists coming in and they walk into a retail shop to buy honko.
SPEAKER_02: And the retail shop is covered in ivory and they would be disgusted. And this would cause enough pressure on the Japanese government to, like, do something about the retail ivory trade. Yeah, that was the basic plan.
SPEAKER_04: But as you probably know, because of COVID, there are no spectators allowed at the games now. And since we're in a state of emergency here anyway, there probably won't be a lot of souvenir shopping. So this opportunity to really shine that international light on the ivory problem in Japan isn't really going to happen. And Masayuki Sakamoto says that even as most of the rest of the world has already banned ivory sales of all kinds, the Japanese government continues to support them. Their ivory policy is just to protect ivory industry.
SPEAKER_07: Regardless of the change of the situation of African elephants and the change of the international countries, only Japan has not changed. That is so frustrating. I mean, it just makes me mad.
SPEAKER_04: Yeah. So, you know, just like the honko itself, the use of ivory in Japan is a tradition that was easy to invent, but it's proving really hard to kill.
SPEAKER_02: Well, thank you so much for adding this part of this, because I'm sure people who know honko really well were kind of thinking it. So I'm glad that we sort of like addressed it. This is something that hopefully people will pay attention to in the future. I really appreciate it. It was super fascinating. I love the whole story. Thank you, Roman. We are part of the Stitcher and Sirius XM podcast family, now headquartered six blocks north in the Pandora building in beautiful uptown Oakland, California. You can find the show and join discussions about the show on Facebook. You can tweet at me at Roman Mars and the show at 99pi.org. We're on Instagram and Reddit too. You can find links to other Stitcher shows I love as well as every past episode of 99pi at 99pi.org. Memo to myself. Schedule meeting to get official Stitcher audio logo.
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