Japan’s Seal of Approval

It can cost as much as $10,000 and as little as 80 cents. It’s essential for emperors and paupers, those buying a $20-million house or a $20 newspaper subscription. It’s a 5,000-year-old technology with deep security flaws but even deeper cultural roots.

It’s the hanko, Japan’s version of the signature.

“I don’t exist in this society without my hanko,” said Kyuyoh Ishikawa, a calligrapher and director of Kyoto Seika University’s Institute for Writing and Civilizations. “Take them away and real society becomes impossible in Japan.”

The hanko, Japan’s counterpart to the Chinese chop, is a cylinder carved on one end with characters that, when stamped in ink, leave the owner’s imprint. Most Japanese have several. Men’s are generally bigger than women’s, and bosses’ larger than those wielded by their subordinates.

The most secure forms of hanko are reserved for banking or real estate deals, while off-the-shelf varieties are used for such everyday tasks as taking delivery of a package or registering a bicycle. It’s one of the first things people look for on any document to make sure everything is official, authentic and trouble-free.

The hanko has a long, distinguished history. Then again, so does fraud. Nobleman Fukumaro Oishi was banished from society in AD 887 for making a counterfeit hanko. He was lucky. Many who followed in his footsteps were crucified.

Hanko technology hasn’t changed a great deal since its origin in ancient Mesopotamia and China. It’s still essentially a version of the hieroglyphics once carved in stone. But the tools available to thieves have changed. Scanners, computer graphics and cutting-edge printing technology make duplicating imprints easier than ever.

“Forgery cases have increased a great deal over the past 10 years,” said Susumu Kobayashi, president of the Kobayashi Document Analysis Institute, who does work for the police. “Japan should really replace the hanko system.”

This is sacrilege to traditionalists, who view the stamp as the embodiment of all things Japanese. “We started our history with hanko; it’s in our DNA,” said Mari Minamoto, a hanko expert and soothsayer. “Criticizing hanko is like criticizing the tea ceremony.”

The stamp shows little sign of disappearing. It even has its own national day. And although some expect the hanko to evolve as credit cards and Internet banking grow more popular, the humble stamp remains an integral part of culture, superstitions, financial life, human relations and history.

Japan’s first evidence of the written word was found on a solid-gold hanko dating to AD 57. Hanko stamps initially were held only by the emperor or, as an extension of his authority, his most trusted vassals. As an old expression has it, your hanko is your most valuable possession--after your life.

Over the centuries, hanko gradually succumbed to the trickle-down theory. Nobles started acquiring their own after 750. Samurai gained access to the club during the Middle Ages, along with an exclusive right to use red ink. The great unwashed masses followed after modernization in 1870.

Gen. Douglas MacArthur used a hanko after World War II to pass down his edicts during the U.S. occupation. Novelist Ogai Mori evoked the stamps’ timelessness in his haiku: “Passing spring. I just spend my time stamping hanko.”

At his small shop in Tokyo’s tradition-bound Asakusa neighborhood, Makoto Hayashi sits hunched over a workbench meticulously carving in reverse several tiny, perfectly formed characters on a hanko.

Hayashi, chairman of the Tokyo Hanko Assn. and son of a kimono maker, has spent the past five decades perfecting his art. “I can carve 40 Chinese characters on a single grain of rice,” he boasts in a room piled high with books, old invoices, dusty glass cases and carving tools.

Hayashi is seeing fewer customers these days, however, as discount competitors employ new technologies to churn out signature seals at a fraction of the $80 or more he charges. “No matter how hard we work to convince people we’re making art, all they want is lower prices,” he says. “It’s really tough.”

A few blocks away at the headquarters of Mr. Hanko 21, Japan’s largest hanko chain, young workers with a few months of computer training create custom-made stamp patterns on computer screens in minutes. A few clicks of the mouse, and the image is relayed digitally to automated cutting tools at 240 stores nationwide.

Company founder and President Takashi Ito predicts that half of Japan’s 6,000 mostly old-style hanko shops will be out of business by 2005 as more efficient players gain a greater share of the $650-million market.

“Traditional shops are dark, narrow and won’t even tell you what they’re charging you until you sit down,” he said. “Stronger companies who understand the customer will survive, and the weak will die.”

Not surprisingly, the old guard hates brash upstarts like Mr. Hanko 21. At one point, some hanko makers petitioned the government for protection against what they see as soulless, socially destructive competition. They made little headway, and most consumers are voting with their wallets. Ito’s chain expects to add 50 stores this year.

Hanko can be made from almost anything hard enough to make an imprint--wood, crystal, shell, plastic, ivory, jade, agate, titanium, gold, water buffalo horn, even woolly mammoth fossils. Some of the most expensive were seen during Japan’s late-1980s economic bubble years, when people paid as much as $20,000 for 24-karat gold and ivory stamps nestled in crocodile-skin cases.

Japan’s prolonged recession has not only fueled discounters, it has tempted many debt-laden people to fake someone’s hanko on insurance policies, savings and loan statements and real estate documents.

Nasty Surprises When the Stamp Is Misused

Investigators using modern forensic methods generally can distinguish which hanko made a particular imprint. Far more difficult, however, is proving that a given hand wielded the stamp. Unlike a signature, anyone can borrow your hanko and return it unnoticed.

This can lead to some unpleasant surprises for those who fail to safeguard their most official hanko, known as a jitsuin. Families have discovered ancestral homes sold out from under them. Elderly Japanese have found bank accounts cleaned out by a trusted nurse. In a few cases, wives have even awoken to find themselves no longer married.

“Often the husband’s lover is behind those cases,” said Masakazu Yoshida, head of the Tokyo branch of the Document Analysis Assn.

It’s not always someone else’s fault. Some recent cases involved people falsely claiming to be victims of hanko fraud in order to get out of loan guarantees made in better times.

Police decline to give statistics on the number of hanko-related crimes, citing security concerns. In generally safe Japan, however, abuses have not reached the level where society is considering adopting signatures as an alternative.

“I just don’t feel comfortable signing something,” said Yumiko Suzuki, 40, an office worker. “If I do, I end up putting a circle around it. We’re just a hanko society.”

Experts say changing values, new technologies and mass production have deflated the stature of the hanko. At one time, your first stamp was a rite of passage: It was bestowed on a son or daughter at age 20, akin to a Westerner receiving his or her first car or credit card. Recently, reduced dependence on paper transactions and overuse of the hanko have caused it to lose some of its luster.

“We need hanko stamps on everything, even something as simple as buying a mobile phone,” said Yuji Kinoshita, a taxi driver working in the suburbs of Tokyo. “It’s gotten to the point where it really doesn’t mean much anymore.”

One culprit appears to be bureaucrats who, in an almost Pavlovian response after World War II, started requiring hanko on everything in sight to deflect their own responsibility. One study estimated that bureaucrats make more than 100,000 imprints during a 25-year career. In an extreme case from the 1960s, an official from Hyogo prefecture reported wielding his almighty stamp 120,000 times in a single year.

Recently, a government program has removed hanko requirements for more than 1,000 applications and administrative procedures, but tens of thousands remain.

Aki Kawashima, president of the Internet security firm VeriSign Japan, believes that this ancient technology stands a good chance of surviving in the digital age, perhaps as a screen-based hanko supported by encryption technology. “Numeric programs aren’t always user-friendly,” he said. “We may see a digital signature with some sort of hanko-like image.”

But Ishikawa, the calligrapher, believes that computerization is as good an excuse as any to scrap the system and switch to signatures, given the heavy baggage the current system carries.

Some See Reasons to Switch to Signatures

The fact that the imprint is produced by an object rather than by hand makes people less accountable. Furthermore, the requirement that people register their marks with the government for important transactions--a carry-over from Japan’s age-old imperial system--carries the implicit message that you don’t exist without state approval.

“Unless the hanko system disappears, real civil society isn’t possible in Japan,” he said. “Japan looks like a democratic society, but at its core it’s still an out-of-date, emperor-centered system.”

Others see a richness in the tradition that can never be duplicated by signatures.

Minamoto, a self-proclaimed hanko “futurologist,” says one look at a stamp--the way its characters are organized and the type of lettering used--and she can tell why people are having bad luck. She believes that by rearranging the face and shape of the stamp, teaching people to press it correctly, tapping into the hanko’s inner spirit and recommending changes in lifestyle, she can change someone’s luck.

“When I make a hanko full of love and family luck elements, most of my single clients get married within a year,” she said. “Then they use the same hanko on the marriage certificate.”

Minamoto has a client list of politicians, movie stars, even the central bank. She helped design the hanko on the nation’s currency. In fact, Japan’s financial system might be in better shape if the bank had given her a free hand with the design. “The hanko they put on money is not lucky,” she said. “That’s the real problem.”

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Makiko Inoue in The Times’ Tokyo Bureau contributed to this report.