Japan unveils new passport with plastic photo page to prevent forgery

They have been available in some other counties for a long time. I have had mine for 7 years.

Innovative Japan again. Only about a decade late.

yeh, about 10 years, but study and learning can be a cost safer?

Only 2 decades after most other countries. Impressive

Urm what? The hard plastic photo page has been standard for my country's passports for the last decade or so and is biometric. Are Japanese passport holders seriously still running around without biometric passports?!

Funny. My first passport that I've done was in 1999 and already had the plastic page with small micro ship inside. That was more than 25 years ago...

Nothing surprising about Japan though, when they are still using plastic hankos, faxes and ISDN lines, while the rest of the world advanced from those decades ago...

Glad to see Japanese passport photos are jus as ghastly as ours!

Glad to see Japanese passport photos are jus as ghastly as ours!

I'm convinced at this point that there is simply no way of having a halfway decent passport or ID photo. Every single one of mine ends up looking like a mug shot. It doesn't help that now, they ask you not to smile for such photos. You're supposed to have a "neutral" expression but I just end up looking enraged.

purple_depressed_baconToday  07:14 pm JST

Urm what? The hard plastic photo page has been standard for my country's passports for the last decade or so and is biometric. Are Japanese passport holders seriously still running around without biometric passports?!

No. Japanese passports began incorporating biometric features back in March 2006.

This new page design is simply aimed at making it harder to forge.

The fee for my 10 year, 48 page passport was 9000 yen 2016.....

I will be anticipate the fee 2026 of the new design to treble that.

AI-generated passport photo

AI-generated passport photo

No, that's a real photo, maybe the name is different though

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Make Passport Photo Online

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many others.

Probably Japan has much less counterfeit cases than some countries that had to adopt the plastic stuff a decade ago.

Oyaji Japan proving itself to be decades behind the civilized world in many respects.

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Which has nothing to do with that particular photo

bass4funk

AI Passport Photo - get verified ID photo for 8,652 state documents

Which has nothing to do with that particular photo

I never it was. Someone said the photo was bad. With AI you can make a perfect photo with a smartphone.

Probably Japan has much less counterfeit cases than some countries that had to adopt the plastic stuff a decade ago.

My thoughts too. I recall zero reports about the counterfeiting of Japanese passports or of Japanese visas, for that matter. These will be more expensive to produce than the older Japanese passports, and, unfortunatley for Japanese living abroad who have to renew passports, will cause a longer wait as the passports will have to be produced at the National Printing Bureau rather than at the embassies overseas. The United States got out of making the identity page of the passports at our embassies in about 1999 or so. I was working at the US embassy in Nepal at the time. It was a sad day as when people wanted to renew their passports, we accepted the applications and sent them to Washington digitally and had to wait for the physical passport to be sent to us to distribute to the Americans applying for renewal in Nepal. It is a big pain all around, especially for the counterfeiters.

Japan has had biometrics for a good while. Now with the extra counterfeiting measures, it will cost more and take more time to get renewed passports. For those who lose their passports overseas, it can mean they have to either wait several weeks for newly issued passports in the country where they lost their old passports, or get a special limited validity emergency passport (still takes a bit of time) from the embassy that will guarantee them additional scrutiny wherever they go until they get it replaced with a new passport.