99% Invisible - 451- Hanko

Episode Date: July 21, 2021

Hanko, sometimes called insho, are the carved stamp seals that people in Japan often use in place of signatures. Hanko seals are made from materials ranging from plastic to jade and are about the size of a tube of lipstick. The end of each hanko is etched with its owner’s name, usually in the kanji pictorial characters used in Japanese writing. This carved end is then dipped in red cinnabar paste and impressed on a document as a form of identification. Hanko seals work like signatures, only instead of signing on a dotted line, you impress your hanko in a small circle to prove your identity. But unlike a signature, which you can make with any old pen or touch screen, in Japan you need to have your own personal hanko with you whenever you stamp something, and you have to stamp it in person.

This is my 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars. The Tokyo Rail and Metro Systems make up one of the largest rapid transit networks in the world. More than 14 billion people walk through its turnstiles every year. That's about 40 million rides every single day. On a typical morning during rush hour, commuters stand cheek to jaw in crammed train carriages.

The busiest stations even employ people busher's known as Oshia, who make sure everyone is packed in before the doors close. But last year, at the start of the COVID epidemic, after the Japanese government declared a state of emergency, the trains emptied out. That's Tokyo-based producer Daniel Simo. Suddenly, there were no O ashia to be seen. In fact, the trains were so empty in the mornings that if you had to take one, there was no need to stand anymore.

For a few weeks at least, most people had stopped riding the train. Most, but not all. It was kind of strange because everybody was supposed to stay at home, but I had to go out every single day. That's Mio Tanaka. She's not a health professional or an essential worker. She runs a company in Tokyo that helps foreign businesses set up in Japan. And yet, at the height of the pandemic, she's still found herself commuting on a daily basis and not just in the metro and not just to one place. So during the COVID my day looked like visiting office in the morning, then take a train,

then taking a bus, then go to another office. So I was a bit scared at that time. But despite the obvious danger, Miho Tanaka had no choice. She was beholden to an old Japanese custom. It's just because every single time I had to stamp some documents with Hanko. Hanko, or in show, as they are sometimes called, are the carved stamp seals that people in Japan often use in place of signatures. Hanko seals are made from materials ranging from plastic to jade and are about the size of a tube of lipstick. The end of each hankou is etched with its own name, usually in the kanji pictorial characters used in Japanese writing.

This carved end is then dipped in red cinnabat paste and impressed on a document as a form of identification. Hongou seules work like signatures, only instead of signing on a dotted line, you impress your hunko on a small circle to prove your identity. But unlike a signature, which you can make with any old pen or touch screen, in Japan, you need to have your own personal hanko with you whenever you stamp something, and you have to stamp it in person. And there is a lot that needs stamping. Just ask me how.

For example, on Monday I visit tax office on Tuesday I visit bank on Wednesday I visit legal affairs bureau and I brought a bank all every single time to stamp some different documents for different procedures. To sign for a package, You need a Hanco. To clock in and out of work. You need a Hanco. To finalize business contracts. You need a Hanco.

And there's not just one kind of Hanco. No, that would be too easy. You might have one cheap Hanco you carry in your bag every day. And another fancy one stored in a safe deposit box that you might only use once or twice in your life. Mijo's job involves a lot of paperwork at government offices, so she often has to use different Hanco for herself and her clients. I have my personal Hanco Plus company Hanco, and when I have to do some procedures in a bank, then I have to bring a hanko for a bank. And did you ever get confused or you take the wrong one, for example?

Always. Yeah, always. And Mijo is not the only one stuck endlessly running around with their hanko. Last March, in the midst of the pandemic, even as everyone was being encouraged to work from home, many people in Japan still needed to do a lot of paperwork. For some, that meant getting on train and traveling halfway across the city, just to stamp a single document. Like a lot of people, I often find Hanco beautiful. Not just the kanji characters or the physical seals themselves. There's also just something

undeniably cool about the act of impressing a hanko onto a document. It's one of the small traditions that makes Japan, Japan. But even most Japanese have gotten to the point where they're fed up with the whole hanko system. So how did Japan get here then? Two decades into the 21st century, why do the Japanese still need to use this ancient analog thing? Because Honkou didn't used to be everywhere in Japan. In fact, they weren't even originally Japanese. The earliest feel that is known to have

gone from China to Japan dates to I think the year 57 AD and that apparently was given by the Chinese emperor. That's Philip Hoo, curator of Asian art at the St. Louis Art Museum and an expert in East Asian Seals. And interestingly, it was a golden seal. It was a seal made of solid gold. Who says the earliest Hancock was status symbols used by the likes of emperors, court officials and samurai? They were made of materials like soapstone and jade, and were engraved using seal script, a form of caligraphic writing. But they were not the kind of thing you saw every day. Theals were very much part of the imperial and civil bureaucracy of Japan.

But at that time, not popular amongst ordinary people. That's because for much of Japan's history, most ordinary people only had given names, or what in the West might be called first names. If you did have a surname, it was usually shit with your entire community. Only members of the feudal aristocracy had the kind of specific family names that you might put on a Hanco. And starting in the 1600s, Japan's Shogun rulers imposed a policy of strict international isolation, cutting Japan off from the rest of the world and effectively preserving this feudal system. So even as late as the 19th century,

most people in Japan didn't really use seals or need them. But things would soon change. Things in part to Matthew Perry. No, not that Matthew Perry. So in 1853, Commodore Matthew Perry, who shares the same name with the friends actor, he shows up with four modern US naval warships and basically forces Japan to open back up.

Nika Poe is a professor of Japanese history at Rutgers University. And this has a huge impact. It's kind of difficult to overstate just how much society changed. The arrival of Paris fleet kicked off a period known as the May-G restoration, in which Japan transformed itself into a modern industrialized nation state. The old feudal system of the Shogunet was done away with, and replaced with a centralized state bureaucracy, which proceeded to change almost everything about how society was structured. They passed a land reform. They instituted free public schooling.

They instituted mandatory conscription. They created a modern military. But in order to do any of that effectively, the new bureaucratic regime needed to make one additional change. Everyone in Japan would have to choose surnames. In the old feudal system, there hadn't been any need for most people to possess distinct names, but the Japanese state now wanted to keep much closer track of who was who.

So in 1875, a law was passed requiring every citizen to register a family name. Those who were too slow in claiming a surname could even be penalized, and in the mad dash that followed, some people just made names up, usually by smashing together words and syllables that had never been combined before. So, as a result of this, you know, sometimes even illiterate farmers just came up with crazy surnames. Even today in Japan, you can find families with names like Cat House, Cow Poop, or simply the number 735.

Lou, my personal favorite surname has to be God. That's it, just God. I'm Joe God. So Japan has maybe the largest variety of surnames of any country per capita. But it wasn't enough that everyone have their own unique-ish name. In this new modern Japan, everyone now also needed their own, Hanko.

So the introduction of seals for everyday use by ordinary citizens was by design. It didn't happen organically. It was more or less by decree. Suddenly, Hanko went from rarefied status symbols to something that almost everyone had, because they had to, and soon, seal manufacturing became its own major industry. You would actually employ a seal-carver. These were specialized vendors, and all they did pretty much was calf seals for other people. Some carvers had large workshops.

Others were a tinder and street vendors who made their way from town to town. And you know, whenever the carver came by your village or your town, and you needed a seal, you would immediately employ them before they moved on to another place. Eventually, there came to be three different types of honko, depending on the context. The regular everyday honko was called a metomian, and everybody has one, okay, and sort of little bag or whatever they carry around because it's so often required for you to just indicate that a transaction has taken place. There was also another type of personal seal used for banking called a ginko in.

You might need one of these to make a deposit or transfer at your local branch. And then there was the jitsu in, which in English means a person's actual seal or their real seal. And a jitsu in is basically a proxy for the person. Jitsu in were not used very frequently, but instead reserved for the most important kinds of documents in a person's life, like mortgages and marriage certificates. It's kind of like having a social security number.

If your social security number could only be written down in one place and had immense sentiment of value. Even today, families will have fancy jitsu and made for their children when they come of age and then store them in a deposit box for safe keeping. Because it's basically saying that I am the person buying a house or I am the person that's marrying you. And so it's very, very personal. In time, almost every element of government, business, and social life were systematized and put onto paper. Usually stand with one of these three Hanco.

But Hanco would come to play an even more visible role in Japanese life in the 20th century. Thanks to a business practice called Nemawashi. Nemawashi is a very important consensus building procedure. Takau Kawasaki is a retired consultant who worked for 40 years for a large Japanese glass manufacturer and he says that building consensus through Nemawashi means laying the groundwork for any big decision by lobbying and consulting with everyone involved prior to moving forward. That means if you have an idea, you have to first approach all those concerned one by one, discuss your plan and get buy-in from each of them individually.

This is done before any larger meeting. So I have to repeat five, six, or even seven times repeat the same explanation to every person to get it okay. And this is where Hancock comes in. Because as you move through the company from the lowest ranks to the highest, once someone understands and agrees with your idea, they get out their seal. Then everybody pressed the Hancock and so whole bunch of Hancock's around each company document. That document full of Hanco stamps is called a ringy.

And if you look at all the stamps around the ringy, there's a sort of implicit code you can decipher, which tells you about things like a company's hierarchy. Bottom is a lower rank. Top is the higher rank. And if you reach the department head that levels, your Hancock getting a little bigger. So when you see the size of the Hancock, you can make a fair guess is what sort of a level that person is in

organization. And naturally, the CEO's Hancock is the biggest. Although if you really want to go big, be sure to Google the Emperor Seal. It's roughly the size of a pro wrestler's fist. It uses a special ink. It's made of solid gold. And it weighs 10 pounds. Even the exact angle of a stamp on a document can reveal something about the person's place in the power structure. A CEO's seal, for example, might be a fixed perfectly straight up and down, with the top of the seal at 12 o'clock, while the top lieutenant seals would be slightly rotated.

Middle management would be angled just a bit further, and so on down the line, with each seal paying deference to those above it. Funny thing though, occasionally one st-on person may now completely agree. In which case, they might still sign off on the plan, but in order to signal that they weren't really totally on board, deliberately they'd angle their stamp just a little too far. And he praised the Hancock 45 degrees turn. Once finished, this Hancock's stre document is a sign that everyone had been consulted and brought in on the latest plan.

So take style, head of a lot, yes. But by the time the final decision is made, everybody is in the same wave ranks, same direction, same goal, so the bull go without a hesitate. For a long time, Nemoashi was simply how business worked in Japan. There was a culture of consensus in which everyone at a company took on risks and rewards together, and it was often credited with Japan's incredible economic growth in the mid-20th century. And as Nemoashi's most visible symbol, the use of the honko went unquestioned. But that would start to change in the 1990s. Well, these GDP figures are very bad, much worse than was expected, and in fact one analyst here in Tokyo today called them worse than disastrous.

In the entire period, 1998 to 2003 was basically a period of recession and depression. It really hit Japan hard. Ulrika Sheda is a professor of Japanese business at the University of California, San Diego. And she says that Japan's recession in the 90s and early 2000s was so bad that the period would come to be referred to as the country's lost decade. And if you look at even at societal measures like robberies and break ins or other signs of social distress like divorce rates, everything went up. So those were really dark days.

And that widespread anxiety had profound effect on the practice of Nema Washi and the Hanco system because it had been easy enough to stamp your approval on a business plan during the boom years when most plans worked. Deepa might have said, yeah, sure, that's fine. You know, even skip some steps, that's not sure. If we can produce it, we can sell it. Let's go, go, go. But once the economy spiraled,

and the risks of stamping your hand go on something multiplied, suddenly everything becomes much more complicated because people say, no, I don't want to sign this or I need to get hand holding before I agree to this or I need something in return for agreeing to this. So the metabolism of the companies slowed down. And this is the word that the Japanese use to describe this. They actually think that the metabolism of the entire economy slowed down. And if that wasn't bad enough, this all happened at the same time that the internet was taking

off. And a tradition requiring people to stamp paper documents using special seals to be physically carried on their person at all times. Well, it hasn't exactly proved internet friendly. If anything, the Hunko has shackled Japan to the old paper system. It really is quite amazing how much paper documents rule the day in Japan. And because of the Hunko. Nick Capors says that the need to physically stamp things

disincentivizes people from ever digitizing documents. Since it's only a matter of time until you have to print any given document back out just so it can be stamped. And everything shuts down until somebody can get into the office and get this handcard of a drawer. Work orders, expense reports, any kind of official company communication, they all need to be in hard copy and certified with a stamp in person. When you go to the bank, when you go to any official, something even receiving the package from personal service, they use your preferred, the handker as a receipt.

And the facts machine, I mean, people have commented on this a lot, but paper faxes are still the only way to get things done because everything requires paper documents that you can stamp on. Miho Tanaka remembers experiencing this kind of friction first hand at her last job, waiting around the office for her boss to stamp a document that could just as easily be signed online nearly anywhere else. Also, I cannot usually ask the other people to put the handkerchief on behalf of somebody else and usually on one paper, like five people have to put stamp. So yeah, that's very time consuming for everybody. When things like PDFs and digital signatures first appeared in the 1990s, many people in

Japan expected that a digital transformation was appeared in the 1990s, many people in Japan expected that a digital transformation was just around the corner, but it never really happened. And ironically, that is in part because of the slowness of Nemoashi and the Hancock system. Like literally the rules are so strict that there's just no way around that unless you change all these rules and that requires all these meetings and discussion and then people have to sign off on it, probably with a Hanco. But lately, it seems as if the cultural tide may have finally turned. Some large Japanese corporations have been quietly retiring the Hanco in recent years,

and a younger generation of Japanese people like Mijo, who have no memory of the pre-intinate boom years, are using Hanko less and clicking boxes more. For example, my parents age like 50-60. They think Hanko is so important, but I think young generation wants to change ASAP, because we all get used to smart-fall in signature process, just like the other Western countries. And now the same state bureaucracy that created the modern Hancock system might have no choice but to kill it. Japan has declared a nationwide emergency as COVID-19 infections exceed 9,000. Medical experts have urged the government to take drastic countermeasures as quickly as possible to slow the contagion. Residents are being told to stay home to help stem the outbreak.

There's increasing pressure to take stronger measures, including a total lockdown of the capital. When COVID first hit, there was a sense that Japan would be spared the worst of it and could keep doing businesses normal. But that didn't last long. Instead, the COVID pandemic finally did what years of bureaucratic stagnation could not. Stories like Miho's of Hancock procedures forcing people to brave train cars in the middle of a lockdown have finally spurred the government to act. In May 2021, the administration of Prime Minister Yoshihida Sugah enacted a set of laws establishing a new agency to speed up the process of digitization.

This involved getting rid of Hancock for almost all government procedures. Many believe this government move is a watershed moment, including Oryka Sheda. Once it has no longer legal standing, I don't see how it can remain important in day-to-day life. It's a little bit sad, actually. But if there is no purpose to it, then people will happily let go. Well, of course, it's a tradition. But tradition can be killed. Takau Kawasaki is a creature of the Hanco happy boom years, if there ever was one.

But he also no longer really sees the benefit of the seal system. To me, I'm rather an old man but the radical old man, I don't care. Because, uh, Megan Business, European Business, you know, have done the business for many, many years without a uncle. Why can't we? Just, just matter of change, just matter of accept. Still, there have been some who want to hold on to the old ways.

They worry that in end to Hanco also marks an end to the country's culture of consensus and shared responsibility in favor of a more western model based on individual accomplishment. One prefectural assembly has officially opposed the government move to phase out Hanco. Another group of lawmakers in the National Parliament recently formed a coalition to preserve them, kind of like a seal appreciation caucus. And in fact, a lot of people I spoke with, even if they recognize the practical need to phase it out for most situations, hope the Hanco won't disappear completely. Philip who concedes that maybe there

shouldn't be three types of Hanco anymore, but can't we at least keep one? He points to the Jitsu in in particular, the real seal, the one that's only pulled out for the really big stuff. I mean, I think it's nice. I think the Jitsu is not such a bad idea to have some kind of personal ceremony to mark a decision of considerable importance in your life. Even Takau Kawasaki has a soft spot for the real seal. He says he fondly remembers using Ed Jitsun when he bought his first home. My father made my Jitsun when I got married and gave it to me. I still use it. And then my son was married

same way I made it and gave it to Shinjuku in Western Tokyo, there's a small Buddhist temple dedicated to Bishamontan, one of the seven lucky gods of Japanese folklore. This past October, a priest knelt by the temple's altar, rang a ball bell and chanted a sutra behind a plastic face shield. He was performing a memorial service for a batch of about 50 Hanco, brought to the temple by a group of nearby office workers. It's not uncommon for inanimate objects to receive funeral rights in Japan. They're a way to bid farewell and commemorate items that have served their purpose and are

no longer needed, like scissors, sewing needles, and honko. In fact, October 1st is Seal Day, when honko shops throughout the country hold memorial services for old retired seals. But at the temple in Shinjuku, there was a distinct sense that this funeral was different. There was a distinct sense that this funeral was different. At this time, it wasn't only these individual Hanco, to which Japan was saying goodbye. A Goregian. That story was produced by Daniel Simo and edited by Joe Rosenberg. When we come back, we'll talk to Daniel about a more problematic tradition involving

Hanco, which Japan is also struggling to bring to an end. After this. So I'm here with Daniel Simo. Hey, Dan. Hey, Roman. So I understand there's another element in the rise and your potential fall of honko that we didn't get a chance to touch on. Yeah, you know, something I've been interested in with this whole story has been the different ways that tradition can develop. I heard a lot about traditions in my reporting and they can often grow in quite an organic way, but sometimes it seems like they can just be fabricated. Right. Because in your story, it was clear that Hanco was a little bit of both because it had this really old aristocratic provenance, you know, stemming from China, but the current sort of use of Hanco

is really something that's like much more recent and much more, you know, design concocted for the present day. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And it turns out there's another supposedly ancient, quote, unquote, tradition, involving Hanco that's even more of a flat out, just invention. And it starts with this guy named Hikaru Sakamoto,

who was a traveling salesman from the prefecture of Yamanashi. Oh, I like a good traveling salesman story, okay. So what is it? Well, back in the 1960s, Sakamoto, the salesman, he was going around Yamanashi, selling jewelry to mostly wealthy customers. And this is when the economic boom that was happening in the 60s was it is just most boom-tastic. And people suddenly

had a lot more money to spend. So he went into their homes and he looked around and he noticed that they were making all these big expensive purchases. But when it came to Hancock, they were still using all these cheap wooden ones that were very common at the time. So, you know, like any good salesman, he saw an opportunity. So he saw all these cheap Hanco and he was like, oh, I can really upsell this market into something fancier. Yeah, so he decided to make and market a new type of luxury, Hanco, made out of a material that was mostly being used for things like pipes and cigarette filters at the time, and it was ivory.

So, he started a company in 1967, and he began to market heavily to department stores and through mail order catalogs and door-to-door sales. And I should be clear, he wasn't the first one to make Hanco out of ivory, but he was definitely a visionary as far as the marketing goes. Okay, so what was his marketing like? Well, he put up ads on newspapers and magazines with pictures and drawings of elephants next to some really purple prose that portrayed elephants as these sacred animals. Take this newspaper ad, for example.

Okay, so this is a very busy ad with an elephant, you know, dead center in the middle. You know, when these little honko sats that are like, kind of beautifully displayed. Yeah. And if you look on the left, actually, there's a pack of two. And the one on the left is, it says it's a jitsu in, which is the real seal. And the one on the right is the ginkgo in, which is the bank seal. So you can get your set of ivory for all your needs that are right next to each other. So what is the ad copy? Because it's very dense with ad copy.

So what is the ad copy, say? Well, basically, it's really talking up the elephant angle. And it's saying that because elephants live long lives in tight family groups, that people with ivory handcos will also enjoy long lives with good fortune. And this advertisement saidphant Library is the best Hancock material, combining fortune, elements, comfortable usage, and durability. That's Masayuki Sakamoto, no relation to traveling salesmen. Masayuki is a lawyer and environmental activist with the Japan Tiger and Elephant Fund. Here's him reading the rest of the ad.

Elephant Library, since ancient times, is a protector against evil and symbol of prosperity, because elephants are not only the world's largest animal, but also the one making harmonious family. So it's Sakamoto here like the salesman Sakamoto. Is he tapping into some actual Japanese tradition here? Is he just sort of making this stuff up? You mean is it is ivory traditionally considered a lucky charm combining fortune and elegance and all that? Right, right, right. No, no, he just made that up.

So if this is if he's sort of making this up whole cloth, I mean, how successful was this? It was hugely successful. I've heard the ads described as the Japanese equivalent of the Diamonds are Forever ad campaign. Oh, yeah. And soon other companies were copying these methods and Ivory Hancos just became this hot new luxury good and Just how it only took a generation really to convince people in the West that Diamond engagement rings were this age-old practice in Japan consumers really quickly brought into this idea that if you were going to get yourself

a good proper Hanco, it should be made out of ivory. So just like that, you had a new tradition being created. It was like a new tradition, even on kind of a new tradition, like all of it's pretty recent in the history of Japan. Oh, yeah, yeah, that's right. And then the demand for ivory just grew and grew throughout the 70s and 80s. And Masayuki Sakamoto says that Japan became the largest ivory importer in the world. And 80% of the low ivory was processed into Hancock.

If you say 80% of that ivory, like how many Hanckos could that be? There is not enough information, but one document said in 1980 about 2 million HanKo was produced in one year. 2 million HanKo a year? That's, I had no idea that would be the amount. I mean, and then also, like, now that you mentioned this ivory part of it, that is a horrifying number. I mean, how many elephants had to die

to feed this fancy hanko habit? Well, there was a report released in 2018 by the Environmental Investigation Agency, which estimated that since 1970, more than 260,000 elephants had been killed to supply Japan with ivory. And again, most of that ivory was just going into making Hanco. And in the 1980s, elephant numbers dropped so much that there was a big international push to ban the trade of ivory, which eventually led to the ratification in 1989 of the ivory band through something

called Cytis, which was the convention on international trade in endangered species. But the thing is, even though there was a band, it didn't necessarily have the full desired effect. Because remember the ad that I showed you earlier? That was from 1998. Whoa. So you said that the band was in 89. So this is nine years later. So that they're advertising that they have fantastic ivory honko in an ad nine years after the band. Yeah. Yeah. That's right. Wow. And the reason for that is simple in reality

Just import is prohibited, but sharing and buying is free in Japan So it's still legal in Japan. Oh, so you can't import any more ivory into the country But all the ivory that was there in Japan before the ban That can be turned into Wonkoo and Perkjust and Sold until it runs out. Yeah, exactly. And on top of that, Japan lobbied successfully

for there to be two final shipments of ivory after the ban. So there was one in 1997 and this one, like China also got in on this one in 2008. And that ivory is still being used. Wow. So are they almost out of ivory? I mean, is this the end of ivory in Japan? Like if I walked into a honko shop today, could I buy an ivory honko?

For the most part, yeah. It's not advertised as heavily as it used to be. And some shops might just refuse to sell it, but it is available. And if you really want to, you can still get your ivory seal. Even now, anyone can buy ivory very openly. The regulation is just when you buy a whole task, you have to get a registration in advance. But if registered library tasks, you can buy freely.

Oh my god, you buy an library task. This doesn't seem like a ban at all. Yeah, it's kind of crazy. And one concern with all this is that because there is still a legal domestic trade for ivory, some people worry that whenever you have a legal trade in something that this continues to feed the illegal trade going into the country. Totally. I mean, because people can still hypothetically smuggle ivory into the country illegally. And it's like laundered by the time it enters into retail. You could just say, oh, this came from before 2008 or the last shipment. I mean, is there a notion from your experts that the legal part of this trade is feeding the illegal import of ivory still?

Yeah, there is. And especially because the regulations are so lax in a way, it's mostly, you know, the only thing you have to register is that whole tusk. But as soon as you cut a tusk and two, you don't have to register it. Wow. I should say that there has been more and more pressure building in the last decade or so.

And two of the main online retailers now here in Japan, Yahoo and Rakuten, have actually banned sales of ivory on their platforms. And a lot of socially conscious Japanese consumers actually might feel a little conflicted about buying ivory now. And, you know, actually the Tokyo Olympics, which are starting very soon, were supposed to be a big turning point for this. Because anti-Avery campaigners were hoping that holding a large international event in Japan would help to shine a light on the problem.

People coming from all over the world, many of whom might want to buy a traditional souvenir while they're in town. Like they can pick up their own honko. And yeah, exactly. So they were hoping that that kind of scrutiny might force the Japanese government to once and for all ban the sale of ivory. So they were imagining the scenario of the Olympics

and all these international tourists coming in and they walk into a retail shop to buy honko and the retail shop is covered in ivory, and they would be disgusted, and this would cause enough pressure on the Japanese government to do something about the retail ivory trade. Yeah, that was the basic plan. But as you probably know, because of COVID, there are no spectators allowed at the games now. And since we're in a state of emergency here anyway, there probably won't be a lot of souvenir shopping. So this opportunity to really shine that international

light on the ivory problem in Japan isn't really going to happen. And Masayuki Sakamoto says that even as most of the rest of the world has already banned ivory sales of all kinds, the Japanese government continues to support them. Their ivory policy is just to protect ivory industry, regardless of the change of the situation of African elephants and the change of the international countries. Only Japan has not changed. That is so frustrating. I mean, it makes me mad. Yeah. So, you know, just like the Hanco itself, the use of ivory in Japan is a tradition that was easy to invent, but it's proving really hard to kill.

Well, thank you so much for adding this part of this, because I'm sure people who know Hunk are really well, we're kind of thinking it, so I'm glad that we sort of like addressed it. This is something that hopefully people will pay attention to in the future. I really appreciate it. It was super fascinating. I love the whole story. Thank you, Arman.

99% Invisible Was Produced This Week by Daniel Simo, edited by Joe Rosenberg, mixed in tech production by Jim Briggs, music by our director of sound Sean Riel. Delaney Hall is the executive producer, Kurt Colstad is the digital director, the rest of the team includes Vivian Le, Emmett Fitzgerald, Chris Baroube, Christopher Johnson, Lashima Dawn, Sophia Klatsker, and me Roman Mars. We are part of the Stitcher & Serious XM Podcast family, now headquartered six blocks north in the Pandora building, in beautiful, uptown, Oakland, California. You can find the show and join discussions about the show on Facebook, you can tweet at me at Roman Mars and the show at 9-9-PI-O-RK. We're on Instagram and Reddit too. You can find links to other Stitcher

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