The New Personal Data Protection in Japan: Is It Enough?

Abstract

This chapter analyses how the concept of personal data protection has evolved in Japan and its current legal regime. Data protection in Japan is assessed from a European perspective as that is the region with the highest level of protection worldwide. Japan lags behind the European standard because during WWII, organised neighbourhood associations encouraged community members surveying each other. However, the digitisation of citizens’ information, scandals of massive data breach and expectations from the European Union prompted Japan to enforce data privacy protection. The chapter then compares the Japanese approach with that of its neighbouring country South Korea as both countries are democracies that decided to enhance their personal data protection regime in order to be recognised by the European Commission as having an equivalent level of protection as the European Union, but they chose different paths to do it. South Korea is more aggressive in safeguarding data privacy than Japan; it has established an independence governing body to enforce and supervise data protection laws even though it does not strictly enforce it.