79.9% of Japan Holds a Digital ID Card. This Year 20 Million Renewals Happen at a Counter

At the end of October 2025, 99.48 million people in Japan held a My Number card. That is 79.9% of the population, up from 73.1% at the start of 2024, and the total passed 100 million shortly afterwards. The figures are in the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare's papers for the 208th meeting of its health insurance subcommittee on 18 December 2025. By any measure of rollout, the programme worked.

In the financial year that started this April, about 5.9 million of those cards and about 14.3 million of the electronic certificates inside them come up for renewal. The figures are from the government's own public information service.

Roughly 20 million renewals in twelve months. The renewal happens at a municipal counter.

How the clock works

The card and the chip on it expire on different schedules, which is the first thing most people get wrong.

For an adult, the card itself is valid until the tenth birthday after it was issued. The electronic certificates recorded on the chip are valid until the fifth. So if you were 18 or over when you got the card, your certificates expire five years before your card does.

Two or three months before expiry, the Japan Agency for Local Authority Information Systems posts you a paper notice. You can renew from the point where less than three months remain. It is free. Somebody can do it for you as a proxy.

If the certificates lapse, you cannot log in to Mynaportal, you cannot print residence certificates at a convenience store and you cannot file through e-Tax. Your card keeps working as a health insurance card for three months and then stops.

There is one more detail that I think is the most revealing thing in the whole scheme. You can now load your certificates onto your smartphone. Those phone certificates expire on exactly the same date as the ones on the card, and when the card's certificate lapses, the phone's lapses with it.

So the digital version of your digital identity is chained to a piece of plastic, whose renewal is a physical errand.

Registration is not use

The other half of this is what people do with the card once they have it, and the health insurance function is the clearest case because the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare publishes it monthly.

87.30 million people, or 87.8% of cardholders, have registered their card as a health insurance card. Registration is close to free: you tap through it once, often at a pharmacy, and it is done.

Use at the counter is another matter. In the same papers, the usage rate reached 39.24% measured against online eligibility checks. At that meeting the ministry also changed the measure, moving to a share of people based on receipt counts, which reads 47.26% for October 2025.

Take the more generous number. Almost nine in ten cardholders have signed up, and fewer than five in ten actually use it when they are standing at the reception desk of a clinic.

That gap is not apathy and it is not distrust. It is what happens when the sign up is one tap and the use is a small unfamiliar procedure performed in front of a queue, with a face recognition reader, at a moment when you are ill and would rather hand over the card you have always handed over.

The metric measured the easy moment

Every digital service I have worked on has had a version of this problem, and the shape is always the same. The number that gets reported to the people funding the work is the number that is easy to move.

Issuance is easy to move. You can run a points campaign, which Japan did, and you can get to four in five people. That is a genuine achievement and I do not want to be glib about it.

But issuance measures the moment a person agreed. It says nothing about the moment they needed it, and it says nothing at all about the moment five years later when it expires.

The card programme was designed around acquisition. You can see it in where the effort went. Applying is possible from a phone. Registering the health insurance function is a tap. Both of those are the parts a campaign can be run against.

Renewal got the paper notice and the counter.

Twenty million people meeting the worst part of the system

Here is what that means in practice this year.

Around 20 million renewals, concentrated because issuance was concentrated. Municipal counters are already reporting sharply higher visitor numbers. Some cities have moved to appointment only. Some are opening on weekends and weekday evenings to absorb it.

Most of these people will do it once and it will be fine. Some will get the notice, put it on the shelf where post goes, and discover the problem when they try to file their taxes. A smaller number will discover it at a clinic three months later.

And every one of them, whatever else they think about the programme, will form their most recent impression of Japan's digital identity system from a queue at a municipal office.

That is the interface. Not Mynaportal. Not the app. The queue is where the product is actually experienced by 20 million people this year, and the queue was not designed by anybody.

What I would change

I am not going to pretend renewal can be fully remote tomorrow. The certificates are the identity anchor and there are real reasons a state wants a physical check somewhere in that loop.

But three things are ordinary product work.

The notice arrives on paper from an agency most people have never heard of, two or three months before a date, and it is the only warning. Anyone whose certificates are loaded on a phone has a device that could tell them, in the app, at the moment they are using it, that this stops working in ninety days. That is a push notification and a countdown. It does not exist.

The five year and ten year clocks are different, and the interval between them exists for a security reason nobody has explained to the public. The result is that a person renews something at year five, believes they are done, and is surprised at year ten. If the two dates cannot be aligned, then the notice needs to say which one this is and what the other one is, in the first line, not in a leaflet.

And the counter visit itself is a known, dated, forecastable event. The government knows today, to the individual, who is due in November. That is not a queue problem, it is a scheduling problem, and every dentist in the country has solved it.

Japan built the hard part. It got a digital identity credential into the hands of four out of five people in a country famously attached to paper and to seals. Then it attached a five year physical errand to it and measured the programme on how many cards were issued.

The next number worth publishing is not the issuance rate. It is what share of renewals happen before the expiry date rather than after it.