One investment I might make soon is one of these new security hanko gadgets.

A hanko, for the uninitiated out there, is a personal seal that serves as your signature for most official purposes in Japan. It looks cool, but suffers from a major drawback: it’s very easy to forge. A person can get a color photocopy of your seal impression, or just take your hanko and seal all sorts of stuff in your name. Like, say, a divorce agreement. That wouldn’t be fun.

So Uniball’s new hanko uses a special security feature: you dial in a two-digit combination, which changes a pattern of marks surrounding your name. Unless a person knows the proper combination, they can’t get the seal to duplicate your registered seal impression.

But, according to Mobile Ojisan:

Mitsubishi Pencil recommends Dial Bank Hanko only for bank use. Some local government outright refuses to register this metal hanko as one’s personal seal.

Brilliant. Now I could protect myself from seal thieves, if only some mildly retarded guy at city hall wasn’t making up rules. “No, no no, your seal has to be ivory.”

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 30th, 2006 at 12:30 am and is filed under Japan, Products, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.