Last May, we were acquainted with the Fuijitaka Child Check System technology equipped on age-verifying vending machines selling cigarettes in Japan. These machines fitted with RFID cards can allegedly recognize which faces belong to minors and which to adult cigarette-smoking Japanese individuals. From the outset, I was already critical of the technology since it had no definite presets and error percentage would presumably be large. I wasn't alone, of course; a reporter from Sankei Sports tested these vending machines and proved what many of us were only guessing until then.

The first round of tests was conducted last June wherein the reporter used various magazine image cutouts to buy the cigarettes. The 6-inch and 3-inch cutouts successfully fooled the cameras, but the 1-inch image failed to do so. Funnier even, is the more recent round of test results which appeared in Sankei Shimbun. Reporters went around Tokyo in search of these machines and found out that they even sell cigarettes to Yen portraits. The reporters had the images on the 1,000 and 10,000 Yen bills scanned by the machine's camera and yes, they were recognized as adult human faces. Said reporters even used the very same notes to pay for the packs--how convenient!