Yay! It’s November 20, the 324th day of the year and, of course, there are now only 33 shopping days left till Christmas. Alistair Cooke and Robert F. Kennedy were born today and Queen Elizabeth got married today in 1947 (to Lieutenant Philip Mountbatten–he got a promotion after that…) The Nuremberg Trials started today in 1945 and the Cuban Missile Crisis ended in 1962.

Most notably, Windows 1.0 was released in 1985. But for many of us, today is the day non-Japanese start to enjoy being fingerprinted and photographed on arrival (for their own comfort and safety) according to a controversial new law.

Pink Tentacle posts a picture of the actual hardware being used–but maybe you’ll be seeing the gizmo first-hand yourself soon enough! Since the post is titled “NEC Helps Big Brother Watch Foreigners in Japan,” it seems the blog does not think much of either the institutions or the new policy itself. They write:

Ministry of Justice officials at airports across Japan have been staging promotional events and showing off the new hardware that will be used to collect the fingerprints and scan the faces of the estimated 5 to 6 million foreigners potential terrorists that enter the country each year. The devices, which proudly bear the NEC logo, consist of a monitor, two fingerprint readers (one for each hand) and a camera that captures mugshots. The devices are being installed at immigration counters nationwide so that you can be fingerprinted and photographed while immigration officials ask you the usual questions about the purpose of your visit and your intended length of stay. Your biometric data will then be stored for an extended period of time in a database, which law enforcement officials will somehow use to thwart terrorist attacks.

I’m sure there is scope here for either segue into yubitsume or crafting of a clever and ironic joke. But I guess if interested you could just read up on it here and consider that, after all, they are only taking pictures. And maybe invading your privacy and who knows what they may do with this info subsequently. But it’s still better than never being able to play the piano again!