Suddenly, it dawned on me that the government must be worried about chip failure. By padding the page, it must be giving extra protection to an e-passport that must weather all kinds of potential consumer abuse.
When handing out a new passport, a helpful Japanese bureaucrat behind the counter assured me, "There is really no difference in the way you handle your e-passport. You can carry it around in your pocket, or in your purse. It can be in close contact with your cell phone. No problem.
"It has some water-proof protection. But if your e-passport was left in a hip pocket of your jeans and was accidentally put in a washer, well, it won't survive the spin cycle.
"Oh, and there is one more thing. You shouldn't put your e-passport in a microwave. I am not saying that you would do such a thing, but an American could. We'd just have to give that warning."
Indeed, I found the "thick" page of my passport has a list of warnings with a "Caution" header on it.
It reads:
This passport contains a sensitive electronic chip and should be treated with great care in the same way as a portable electronic device.
The passport must not be bent, twisted, perforated, immersed in liquid or dropped.
Neither should it be subjected to extreme heat or humidity, placed in direct sunlight or near electro-magnetic fields such as television sets or microwave ovens, or come into contact with chemical substances.
Best of all, I get to handle this delicate objet d'art with kid gloves for the next ten years– until it dies of natural expiration.
The irony here is our apparently eager acceptance in important government-issued documents of a technology that has never been tested with consumers in the real world applications over such a long period of time, anywhere in the world.
Further, I couldn't help thinking of the eventuality when passports with non-operative chips will become common.
Does any government have any real plans for that?
Obviously, anyone seeking to defeat my e-passport's security safeguards could simply disable the chip, by microwaving it, as the Japanese bureaucrat helpfully pointed out. Another fun scenario is the traveler who doesn't know his or her passport RFID chips has failed after sitting in direct sunlight too long on a beach. The hapless tourist reaches the airport. Alarms sound. Gendarmes scramble. Drug-sniffing dogs descend. Choas follows.
It's possible that my e-passport is just one more delay added to the current cornucopia of travel delays.
