Tokyo: The Japanese government is set to make it possible for parents to submit their children’s birth registrations and certificates to local municipalities online through the Mynaportal website for holders of My Number personal identification cards.

The move is aimed at eliminating the need for parents to bring paper documents to municipal government counters, while reducing the administrative burden on municipalities.

The government plans to create a provisional system for online birth registration by this summer and introduce it in some areas ahead of others, aiming to launch the online registration system in full scale across the country in fiscal 2026 at the earliest.

By this summer, the government will implement necessary system renovations and revise related rules to allow birth reports to be submitted through the Mynaportal site.

Based on the country’s family registration law, parents are currently asked to submit their children’s birth notifications and certificates in writing to local municipalities within 14 days of childbirth. Municipalities manually input such information as children’s names, dates of birth, addresses, heights and weights into the family registration system.

Under the provisional system, parents will use their smartphones or cameras to take photos of their children’s birth certificates handwritten by doctors or midwives and attach the photos when submitting birth registrations online.

The government plans to further upgrade the Mynaportal site to allow it to have access to family registry information held by municipalities across the country and create a network linking municipalities with medical institutions.

It aims to introduce a fully online birth registration system nationwide as early as fiscal 2026 to allow doctors and midwives to digitally send birth certificates, including information on children’s heights and weights, directly to municipalities, which would no longer need to input such data manually.

“As some people do not have smartphones, it may be necessary to retain paper procedures, but in the future, we want to ask parents to submit their children’s birth registrations online in principle,” an official at the Cabinet Secretariat said.

The government is also considering introducing an online submission system for death notifications and death certificates.

JIJI Press