Facial recognition technology will be deployed at major airports in fiscal 2019 to screen foreign visitors as they leave Japan, a Justice Ministry official said Monday. Similar gates are being used at Tokyo's Haneda airport to screen returning Japanese, but the new plan will allow the Immigration Bureau to allocate more human resources to the processing of foreign arrivals, shortening waiting times, the official said. They also said it would allow more immigration staff to be tasked with counterterrorism duties ahead of the 2020 Tokyo Olympics. The gates scan faces and compare the images with the photographic data encrypted on microchips in passports. The gates automatically open if the computer verifies a match.