Is it true that Japan is responsible for manufacturing Korea's passports and creating the IC chips embedded inside them? No, that's not true: Passports are tightly controlled by the country of issue, which manufactures and prints them in either public or private firms headquartered in the country where the passport is issued, and IC technology has been commonly used in passports since 1998 and is widely available.
The claim appeared on TikTok (archived here) where user @welcomejapan12 published it on March 24, 2024. It is a part of an animated video series, with the video showing a scenario where a Korean university student encounters a Japanese exchange student at his university, and proceeds to boast about the high value and rank of the Korean passport. Captions translated from Japanese into English by Lead Stories staff read:
Korean university student: The Korean passport is trusted by everyone around the world! There's no chance Japan could ever compete! Japanese student: But isn't that [the Korean passport] made in Japan?
In the complete video clip available on YouTube, (archived here) the Japanese student explains in translated comments:
Passports must follow a global standard [Japan's IC chips], and Korean manufacturers follow Japan's standard. Korea tried to develop their own IC chips to use on their passports but failed the testing stage, so they resorted to use the Japanese-manufactured ones instead [...] Even the holographic photo ID in the passport are made in Japan
This is what the post looked like on TikTok at the time of writing:
(Source: TikTok screenshot taken on Thu Mar 28 21:51:28 2024 UTC)
Because each passport and IC chip is considered to contain personal data about the holder and is proof of citizenship, passports are issued by national authorities in the country that the citizen is from. In Japan, this task is handled by the Japan National Printing Bureau (archived here), and in South Korea, it is handled by Korea Minting and Security Printing Corporation (archived here).
It is not true that Japan's IC chip technology is the global standard, as IC technology was discovered in the United States by US physicist Robert Noyce (archived here) for Fairchild Semiconductors in 1959. Additionally, it was not Japan that started the global standard for biometric passports; it was Malaysia that issued the first set of biometric passports in 1998 (archived here), thus creating a global norm for other countries to follow for added security.
