A census official comes to your house, gives you a piece of paper to fill out about your household, asks you a few questions, and then departs.

Here's the miscalculation: pension benefits are administered by the pension office of the city you live in. Unlike America, everyone is registered at the local town office. When you move between towns, you're supposed to a notification with the old town and the new town. They don't synch their records, which are still kept mostly on paper. Thus, if I were hypothetically an old man who lived with my family in Nagoya, then moved to an old folk's home in Ogaki (establishing a new household there), the pension system would not necessarily catch me drawing pensions in two places. If I subsequently expire in Ogaki, notification of my death will update Ogaki's records, but nobody will call Nagoya to tell them "Hey, this guy who shouldn't be on your books anymore is dead now."

If this strikes you as a mindbogglingly inefficient way to run a national pension system worth trillions, wait until I tell you about the time where they discovered they had just totally lost the records of the existence of several million people.

So you're saying the hidden or unnoticed dead person isn't the cause of most of these, it's just that incorrect double pensions turn into incorrect single pensions? Hm... it still seems like the census data could be incorrect. All those people who are receiving pensions for dead people have a pretty big incentive to make it look like that person is still alive, so I don't see why they'd fill out the census form without counting the dead person.

For these and other reasons, the Census makes it quite clear that they treat all information as confidential and do not report it to any government agency. There were ads explaining that for literally months prior to the last census. The census taker who stopped by to speak with me helpfully noted that Japan would be quite grateful if, for statistical purposes, I would mention all of my illegal relatives, too, and that he would absolutely not speak to Immigration about them.

The census may claim to treat information collected as confidential. But why would people believe them? The US government also claims census data is confidential, but that claim has been proven to be a lie.

http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2007-03-30-census-role_N...

I am not sure how a disclosure of information during World War II that was legal under the laws of the time has any relevance on how information is treated now. See http://www.census.gov/privacy/data_protection/title_13_-_pro...

Was it legal to round people up like that without even probable cause before the war? Current law can be changed and even constitutions ignored when it becomes convenient.

Maybe those committing fraud believe that if they NEVER disclose something, its pretty much a sure thing that it can never be used against them.

You might be able to convince me that at least one person lied on the census, but you will have a very hard time convincing me that even 10% of the dead/moved eldery had somebody lie to the census about their existance. I find it far more likely that most of these people are a series of clerical errors.

I wouldn't try to convince you that dead people did anything.

The government changed the law to allow previously private information to be used for new purposes. They could do this again.

The only way you can prevent the government from misusing information is not to give it to them.

exactly. people committing fraud and getting away with it are well aware that the government can say one thing and do another. Because they're doing the exact same thing.

Many people should have to prove they are still alive periodically. How hard can it be to send in a video holding the newspaper of the day?

For anyone living in Japan, the surprising thing is that it works at all. The possibilities for cheating are endless. It should be noted though that people in Japan do not move often. Actually, there are a lot of practices which make moving quite a bear (e.g. you have to pay up to 6 months of rent in advance for a new place, money which is often mostly lost, although the practice varies from area to area).