"There is a law that invalidates such payment in small coins:

“Law on Unit of Currency and Minting of Coins
Article 5. There shall be 6 types of coins, namely 500 yen, 100 yen, 50 yen, 10 yen 5 yen and 1 yen.
Article 6. Coins are legal tender up to 20 times of their face value.”

Should Japan fingerprint foreigners?

As you are the only person so regularly singled out, you ask, "Hey, why always me?" The answer is, "if you're innocent, why worry about it?"

Eventually after your visits to the police station become almost daily, you plead with the officers to leave you alone. One of them has a revelation: "Hey, instead of destroying your fingerprints each time, let's make a permanent record! Then, every time there's a crime we'll use that?"

Problem solved? Of course not. Having had enough, you spit in outrage, "why me? Why is it always my fingerprints and not anyone else's you compare to those found at crime scenes?" One officer smiles sheepishly and explains, "it's because you're a foreigner."

Sound unrealistic? Unfortunately, it's not. It's a reality. It's already happened in the U.S., and it will soon be happening here.

Do you wish to enter Japan? Then you are suspect. Before you can enter you must turn over your fingerprints and allow them to be cross checked against an international list of criminals and terrorists. And that's just the beginning.

The prints will remain on record for 70 years. According to the new procedures, if requested, the Justice Ministry will turn over the data to the police and other government agencies.

What's that mean? It means like our fictional character in the beginning of this story, that for any crime committed in Japan, there is a high probability that you will be treated as a de facto suspect.

While no citizens will have to submit fingerprints by default, yours will already be there. And you'd better believe you are a de facto suspect in each case. It'll be as easy as pushing a few buttons on a computer.

Is it fair for a foreigner to be a de facto suspect in potentially any crime in Japan where fingerprints are lifted? No.

The Japan Federation of Bar Associates has come out strongly against this measure. (See: www.nichibenren.or.jp/ja/publication/booklet/data/nyukanhou_qa.pdf)

Among the many useful arguments they make, they point out that the measure might well stigmatize foreigners as somehow being more inherently capable of crime than Japanese.

They also note that it is clearly unconstitutional under Article 13. And yes, the constitution does apply to people seeking entry into Japan. They may not be citizens, but they are people.

(Article 13 reads: All of the people shall be respected as individuals. Their right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness shall, to the extent that it does not interfere with the public welfare, be the supreme consideration in legislation and in other governmental affairs.) 

Ultimately, this policy puts foreigners at unfair risk. I typed in the phrase "how to fake fingerprints" on Google recently and got back over half a million hits. I checked the first 60, which told you how to do just that.

You leave your fingerprints everywhere you go. You leave them on trains, on vending machines, any place you lay your hands. Foreigners will have to take this in stride as they become de facto suspects in almost every crime committed.

There are respected scholars, former police officers, and journalists now questioning the entire science of fingerprinting. And whose to say how long it takes before collected prints are leaked through Winnie?

Putting all this aside, guess what? This policy just won't work. Does anyone really believe that all terrorists are foreigners? The Tokyo subway sarin attack comes to mind (6000 injured, 12 dead), so does the bombings of Mitsubishi Heavy Industries in Tokyo in 1974 (20 injured, 8 dead) and the Hokkaido Prefectural Government office in Sapporo in 1976 (80 injured, 2 dead). The obvious prejudice here is palpable.

Lest anyone forget, most of the 9/11 terrorists entered America legally. Terrorists often have clean records and are not on watch lists.

So if not terrorists, who is on the watch lists? Well as the Justice Ministry will rely on an international list, in many cases they have no way of knowing.

There have already been credible reports of activists in America being detained because their names turned up on terrorists watch lists (simply a mistake?).

Recently some British citizens were outraged when they found that their names had been put into a criminal database (more mistakes?).

Terrorists with clean records will be able to enter, ordinary people will be hindered and face rights abuses.

If none of this is enough, has anyone stopped to even fathom the cost involved here?

So what you have here is a ineffective policy that clearly discriminates against foreigners and costs a bundle of cash.

In short, the worst of all worlds.

Let's deal with the basic counterarguments: Calling gaijin a mere contraction of gaikokujin is not historically accurate. According to ancient texts and prewar dictionaries, gaijin (or "guwaijin" in the contemporary rendering) once referred to Japanese people too. Anyone not from your village, in-group etc., was one. It was a way of showing you don't belong here — even (according to my 1978 Kojien, Japan's premier dictionary) "regarded as an enemy" ("tekishi"). Back then there were other (even more unsavory) words for foreigners anyway, so gaijin has a separate etymology from words specifically meaning "extra-national."

Even if one argues that modern usage renders the two terms indistinguishable, gaijin is still a loaded word, easily abused. Consider two nasty side effects:

1) "Gaijin" strips the world of diversity. Japan's proportion of the world's population is a little under 2 percent. In the gaijin binary worldview, you either are a Japanese or you're not — an "ichi-ro" or a "ze-ro." Thus you suggest that the remaining 98 percent of the world are outsiders.

2) . . . And always will be. A gaijin is a gaijin any time, any place. The word is even used overseas by traveling/resident Japanese to describe non-Japanese, or rather "foreigners in their own country," often without any apparent sense of irony or contradiction. Logically, Japanese outside of Japan must be foreigners somewhere, right? Not when everyone else is a gaijin.

Left unchallenged, this rubric encourages dreadful social science, ultimately creating a constellation of "us and them" differences (as opposed to possible similarities) for the ichiro culture vultures to guide their ideological sextants by.

For those hung up on gaijin's apparently harmless kanji ("outside person"), even that is indicative. The "koku" in gaikokujin refers specifically to country — a legal status you can change. The epithet doesn't, effectively making classification a matter of birth status, physical appearance, race. All of this means that once you get relegated to the gaijin group, you never get out.

Allow me to illustrate that with a joke from the American South.

Question: "What do you call a black man with a Ph.D. in neurobiology from Harvard who works as a brain surgeon at Johns Hopkins, earns seven figures a year, and runs one of the world's largest philanthropies?"

Answer: "N--ger."

Hardy har. Now let's rephrase.

Question: "What do you call a white man with degrees from top-tier schools who has lived in Japan for more than two decades, contributes to Japanese society as a university educator, is fluent in Japanese, and has Japanese citizenship?"

Answer: "G--jin."

Nobody who knows I'm a naturalized Japanese citizen calls me a gaikokujin anymore — it's factually incorrect. But there are plenty of people (especially foreigners) who don't hesitate to call me a gaijin, often pejoratively.

Thus gaijin is a caste. No matter how hard you try to acculturate yourself, become literate and lingual, even make yourself legally inseparable from the putative "naikokujin" (the "inside people," whoever they are), you're still "not one of us."

Moreover, factor in Japan's increasing number of children of international marriages. Based upon whether or not they look like their foreign parent (again, "gaijin-ppoi"), there are cases where they get treated differently, even adversely, by society. Thus the rubric of gaijin even encourages discrimination against Japan's own citizens.

This must be acknowledged. Even though trying to get people to stop using gaijin overnight would be like swatting flies, people should know of the word's potential abuses. At least people should stop arguing that it means the same as gaikokujin.

For gaijin is essentially "n--ger" and should be likewise obsolesced.

Fortunately our media is helping out, long since adding gaijin to the list of "hoso kinshi yogo" (words unfit for broadcast).

So can we. Apply Japan's slogan against undesirable social actions: "Shinai, sasenai" ("I won't use it, I won't let it be used.").