The below is my husband facebook post.
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The actual seller and seller's agent sit down in the same room as the buyer and buyer's agent, the money (which is CASH) is counted, and people affix their seals to documents.
For those of you who haven't heard of this practice or haven't experienced it, we don't sign things in Japan. We use an 印鑑, inkan, which is a rubber stamp with a seal on it. If I had a gander at why we use these in Asia, I would say that it has to do with the fact that writing is simply a bigger deal here - while some folks may lament the decline of handwriting skill in the West, that's peanuts to what people in the east would be bitching about. In Japan, they used to have to let entire provinces starve because the local officials' brushstrokes were slightly out of place.
Anyway, IF they were to, say, make the stamps electronic and take a PIN or something they would be vastly better than a signature. But as it is, they are obviously much less secure than a signature and easier to fake. If you steal a person's seal you can fuck with them quite a bit.
But there's something else we bumped into today. We went to the Ward Office to register my hanko, which is a thing you need to do if you are buying real estate (or a non-kei car, apparently).
Inkan are usually obtained as a pair, one for everyday use and one for serious shit, like real estate deals, my understanding was that its like, maybe your given name for the regular one, but the kanji for your family name AND your given name for the real-deal one.
So before I came here {Blogauthor} got me one that says "{Name}” and one that says "{Name}{Family Name}".
But then from the say I started filling out official forms to get to live here in Japan, they always asked me to put my name exactly as it appears on my passport. My passport application years ago needed me to enter my name exactly as it appears on my birth certificate, including middle name, so its "{Name} {Middle Name} {Family Name}" which in Japan means my family name is "{Family Name} " and given name is "{Name} {Middle Name} / {FullName(NotNickname)}" - no middle names here, so first + middle name becomes my given name.
Now I had always thought that the hanko was basically up to, could kind of be anything, because Japanese folks often have kanji with readings that are very obscure and the act of registering it, I thought, is what made it officially your seal.
But it rurns out, no, the seal needs to be YOUR NAME. It can actually be your family name, or your given name, or both, but it must match your name.
So my seal doesn't match my name, so I can't register it and need a new one.
And the places where we can get one fast don't support my full family name plus given name. So new seal ordered, whatever, I will register it and then I guess re-register it at the new place when I move then rarely if ever use it again.
BUT WAIT. {Blogauthor} changed her name early this year, to "{Name} {U.S. Family Name} {JP family Name"} - she keeps her family name but affixed some katakana to her given name, And when its written out on her new passport it makes more sense to customs/ immigration agents in America.
So she went through this big long process that involved appearing before a magistrate to get this done in her hometown's office. And used her existing seal of "{Name}" in kanji.
And nobody mentioned to her that she would have to get a new hanko to register, because her seal no longer matched her name.
Until we were in the ward office today, after having stamped a whole bunch of house buying forms with that seal.
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