Seems like another article where Americans finding out how the rest of the world doesn't use the same retarded systems as they do. What's next, an article about this marvelous invention called 'the metric system' that is used in Bolivia ?
Exactly my thought. Every European country I've lived in works in pretty much the same way. Of course saying it comes from Japan makes it look more sophisticated ;)
Actually no, the koseki system or similar can be found in other Asian countries like South Korea but not in Europe.
In France you can get a birth certificate, a marriage certificate, and you have a "livret de famille" that regroups all these information but that's a document that you own, not the administration. There is no registry that regroups all the information about a given family.
Also note that in Japan, a women getting married will be transferred from her parents' koseki to her husband's koseki. There is no such thing in Europe.
European countries don't have a family-centered system like the Koseki (or Chinese Hukou; Wikipedia says South Korea abolished their system a decade ago) where a document represents a family.
But several of them do have a population register (which is individual-centered, but with references up and down in the family tree). In Sweden you don't get birth or marriage certificates. If you want to prove your birth or marriage, you get your population registry extract which shows that you are registered as existing (proves birth) or married.
So they're the same in that they are based on current state rather than collecting event documents. But they're different in that one represents families, whereas the other represents individuals.
Japan also has a separate residency register. While the koseki shows who is in a family (birth/parents, marriage/children), the residency register shows where you live now/before (and is used for taxation). European countries with a population register simply use the same registry for both purposes.
>event-based” Official Documents (birth certificates, divorce decrees and so forth) that prevail in places like America
Almost all other developed countries have comprehensive civil registration system that is not event based (The first country to establish a nationwide population register was Sweden in 1631).
In United States some of these functions are divided between Office of Vital Records in each state and clerk of court of each individual county, but you need official document trail for most things.
As a recent immigrant to Finland the population system there is pretty fascinating. Seeing how many men/women share my forename was pretty cool, for example.
One of the immediate perks was moving house - I updated my address in the population index and suddenly all the companies that bill me and send me mail had new details. No extra effort.
(Of course then I had to update my contact details on domains, and online stores outside Finland, but it was a great timesaver.)
In The Netherlands the civil registry is considered privacy sensitive information and not publicly accessible. You can get an extract of your personal information but you can't access the information of others, not even family or people who are already dead for use in genealogical research. Your records are opened to the public 100 years after death.
