Nights out drinking can often end badly. But in Japan, they have a habit of going spectacularly wrong for government employees \u2013 who on at least two occasions in recent years have lost sensitive personal data after a few too many beers. <\/p>\n
An employee of the Finance Ministry\u2019s customs and tariff bureau went drinking with a colleague after work last Thursday, in the city of Yokohama south of Tokyo, according to public broadcaster NHK. <\/p>\n
Within five hours, the man had nine glasses of beer, it reported. It wasn\u2019t until he had left the restaurant, gotten on a train and traveled home that he realized his bag \u2013 containing highly sensitive information \u2013 was missing. <\/p>\n
The employee had received the documents at a meeting earlier that day, the ministry said. Also in the bag was the employee\u2019s work laptop, containing personal information about the man and his colleagues. <\/p>\n
The ministry apologized to the public for \u201cdamaging\u201d their trust, promising to punish the employee, according to NHK. So far, there have been no reports that the lost information has been used illegally, it said. <\/p>\n
It may sound like an astonishing blunder \u2013 but it\u2019s not the first time something like this has happened. <\/p>\n
In 2022, another government worker lost a USB flash drive containing the personal details of every resident of the city of Amagasaki, northwest of Osaka. <\/p>\n
The man had fallen asleep on the street after drinking alcohol at a restaurant, and when he woke up, his bag containing the flash drive was gone, NHK reported at the time. <\/p>\n
The flash drive contained the names, birth dates, and addresses of 465,177 people \u2013 the city\u2019s entire population. It also contained sensitive information including tax details, bank account names and numbers, and information on households receiving public assistance such as childcare payments. <\/p>\n
While these two incidents represent unusually embarrassing nights out, Japan has long been notorious for its heavy drinking work and office culture. <\/p>\n
It\u2019s not unusual to see groups of salarymen in business suits chugging beer at izakaya<\/em> pubs late into the evening or slumped in the middle of the street after consuming too much. <\/p>\n Japan\u2019s health ministry warned of the dangers of excessive drinking in 2021, calling it a \u201cmajor social problem.\u201d <\/p>\n These marathon drinking sessions serve to encourage business relations with colleagues and clients, often helping secure deals and curry favor in the workplace. But the heavy drinking habits are also a reflection of Japan\u2019s grueling work culture \u2013 with employees traditionally working brutal hours under immense pressure with stagnant salaries. <\/p>\n Even as Japan\u2019s government tries to ease the pressure \u2013 drafting legislation to prevent death and injury from excessive work hours, and introducing a four-day workweek for Tokyo government employees \u2013 old habits die hard. <\/p>\n Combine that drinking culture with Japan\u2019s particularly old-fashioned preference for analog technologies and the risk increases of sensitive data going astray. <\/p>\n Japan\u2019s bureaucratic systems are famously slow to change, with a reliance on technologies and systems that are obsolete in many other parts of the world \u2013 hence employees\u2019 use of hard drives, paper documents and other easily-lost items. <\/p>\n This was highlighted in 2018 when the then cybersecurity minister shocked the public by saying he\u2019d never used a computer \u2013 a claim he later walked back after it made international headlines. <\/p>\n The massive gap in modern technology became clear during the Covid-19 pandemic when the government\u2019s efforts toward mass vaccination and testing revealed the inefficiencies of paper filing and other outdated systems, Reuters reported. <\/p>\n A digital agency was soon set up to overhaul the government\u2019s internal systems. The new digital minister declared a \u201cwar on floppy disks\u201d \u2013 which were only phased out across the government in 2024, long after other major economies and world leaders had stopped using them. <\/p>\n The agency has also targeted fax machines and traditional carved seals used instead of signatures to sign documents in Japan. <\/p>\n<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Nights out drinking can often end badly. But in Japan, they have a habit of going spectacularly wrong for government employees \u2013 who on at least two occasions in recent years have lost sensitive personal…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":3808,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[118],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3807","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-world"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/invest360pro.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3807","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/invest360pro.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/invest360pro.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/invest360pro.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/invest360pro.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3807"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/invest360pro.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3807\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/invest360pro.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3808"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/invest360pro.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3807"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/invest360pro.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3807"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/invest360pro.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3807"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}