Japanese City Tags Elderly Dementia Sufferers With Barcodes (japantimes.co.jp)

"The Japanese city of Iruma has introduced scannable adhesive barcodes to tag fingernails of senior citizens with dementia who are prone to getting lost as a way to help concerned families find missing loved ones," writes HughPickens.com, citing this article from Japan Times: The adhesive QR-coded seals for nails -- part of a free service launched last month and a first in the country -- measure just 1 cm (0.4 inches) in size. "Being able to attach the seals on nails is a great advantage," says a city worker. "There are already ID stickers for clothes or shoes but dementia patients are not always wearing those items." If an elderly person becomes disorientated, police will find the local city hall, its telephone number and the wearer's ID all embedded in the QR code. Japan is grappling with a rapidly aging population, with senior citizens expected to make up a whopping 40 percent of the population around 2060.
The article describes Japan as "a country where 4.8 million people aged 75 or older hold a license... Last month, police started offering discounts for noodles at local restaurants to elderly citizens who agreed to hand in their driving licenses."

Comments

Old innovation

[Trachman]

Many of the early commentators are missing the point.

Barcode is the direct allusion to Nazi Germany innovation of using permanent tattooed numbers to account their inmates. By the way, they have used IBM computers, leading novel technology, to keep track of inmates.

At the same time Soviets did not use codes on the bodies of their prisoners in GULAG, because they had way more prisoners and all their efforts were directed toward building weapons for WW2, not dealing with computers.

Fun stuff. Who could have thought that the nazi ideas will be implemented, treated as novel and applied towards humans. The difference between permanent tatoo and a small finger nail sticker with strong adhesive is really tiny.

Re:Won't be allowed in America

[rworne]

Somehow I'd knew it'd come to this.

This type of article is exactly what you'd expect from The Drudge Report, and /. seems to be a bit late with the news (it was on Drudge last week).

Quite simply:

Japan does not have the same cultural baggage about this you'd find in the west. There's no huge population that had the whole Bible and "Mark of the Beast" drummed into their heads. There's no conspiracy theorists. No persecution of Jews - even though they were an ally of Nazi Germany.

In WWII, for all the things the Japanese did during the war, they did not share the Nazi's attitude towards Jews. Chiune Sugihara saved many European Jews during the war by giving them visas allowing them to escape Europe via Siberia. The government and the military pretty much ignored the orders to round up and exterminate Jews coming from Germany, with the one exception of a ghetto being built in Shanghai. The Japanese did not run any extermination campaigns and pretty much left Jews in their sphere of influence alone during the war.

Because of this, the marking of individuals does not carry the same knee-jerk gut reaction there as it would here, and people in Japan would liken it to how Americans see the commonplace medical alert bracelets.