Why do Japanese government workers keep losing sensitive data while drunk?

People walk through restaurants' signs at China Town in Yokohama, south of Tokyo, Wednesday, June 14, 2023. (AP Photo/Shuji Kajiyama) (Shuji Kajiyama/AP)

Nights out drinking can often end badly. But in Japan, they have a habit of going spectacularly wrong for government employees – who on at least two occasions in recent years have lost sensitive personal data after a few too many beers.

An employee of the Finance Ministry’s customs and tariff bureau went drinking with a colleague after work last Thursday, in the city of Yokohama south of Tokyo, according to public broadcaster NHK.

Within five hours, the man had nine glasses of beer, it reported. It wasn’t until he had left the restaurant, gotten on a train and traveled home that he realized his bag – containing highly sensitive information – was missing.

The finance ministry revealed the security breach this week, confirming to CNN that the bag contained administrative documents with the names, addresses, and case summaries of 187 people – including a suspect allegedly involved in drug smuggling.

The employee had received the documents at a meeting earlier that day, the ministry said. Also in the bag was the employee’s work laptop, containing personal information about the man and his colleagues.

The ministry apologized to the public for “damaging” their trust, promising to punish the employee, according to NHK. So far, there have been no reports that the lost information has been used illegally, it said.

CNN has reached out to the ministry for comment on the status of the employee and the data.

It may sound like an astonishing blunder – but it’s not the first time something like this has happened.

In 2022, another government worker lost a USB flash drive containing the personal details of every resident of the city of Amagasaki, northwest of Osaka.

The man had fallen asleep on the street after drinking alcohol at a restaurant, and when he woke up, his bag containing the flash drive was gone, NHK reported at the time.

The flash drive contained the names, birth dates, and addresses of 465,177 people – the city’s entire population. It also contained sensitive information including tax details, bank account names and numbers, and information on households receiving public assistance such as childcare payments.

A culture of drinking, and retro tech

While these two incidents represent unusually embarrassing nights out, Japan has long been notorious for its heavy drinking work and office culture.

It’s not unusual to see groups of salarymen in business suits chugging beer at izakaya pubs late into the evening or slumped in the middle of the street after consuming too much.

Japan’s health ministry warned of the dangers of excessive drinking in 2021, calling it a “major social problem.”

These marathon drinking sessions serve to encourage business relations with colleagues and clients, often helping secure deals and curry favor in the workplace. But the heavy drinking habits are also a reflection of Japan’s grueling work culture – with employees traditionally working brutal hours under immense pressure with stagnant salaries.

Even as Japan’s government tries to ease the pressure – drafting legislation to prevent death and injury from excessive work hours, and introducing a four-day workweek for Tokyo government employees – old habits die hard.

Combine that drinking culture with Japan’s particularly old-fashioned preference for analog technologies and the risk increases of sensitive data going astray.

Japan’s bureaucratic systems are famously slow to change, with a reliance on technologies and systems that are obsolete in many other parts of the world – hence employees’ use of hard drives, paper documents and other easily-lost items.

This was highlighted in 2018 when the then cybersecurity minister shocked the public by saying he’d never used a computer – a claim he later walked back after it made international headlines.

The massive gap in modern technology became clear during the Covid-19 pandemic when the government’s efforts toward mass vaccination and testing revealed the inefficiencies of paper filing and other outdated systems, Reuters reported.

A digital agency was soon set up to overhaul the government’s internal systems. The new digital minister declared a “war on floppy disks” – which were only phased out across the government in 2024, long after other major economies and world leaders had stopped using them.

The agency has also targeted fax machines and traditional carved seals used instead of signatures to sign documents in Japan.

By Jessie Yeung and Junko Ogura, CNN