Central — Local Relations for Protection of Personal Information

Abstract

　Laws and systems regarding the protection of personal information in Japan are currently undergoing major changes. The system for personal information protection in Japan has been decentralized, because that the idea of local autonomy was emphasized, and some local governments enacted personal information protection ordinances that were more advanced than the law of national government. Such decentralization was maintained even when the Personal Information Protection Law was enacted in 2003. The national government has been involved in the protection of personal information of local governments to a certain extent only.

　However, in the areas of handling personal information when a large-scale disaster occurs and handling personal information related to medical care, the decentralized system has become more troublesome. For this reason, the system for personal information protection has come to be unified in recent years. In this paper, we examine this transformation process of from decentralized system to unification lead by national government.