Originally Posted by
kebosabi
OTOH, the format of the biographical page of a passport is set to an international standard that all countries adhere to. US, Japanese, Kuwaiti, etc. the biographic page is written in Romanized letters, it conforms to a uniform standard, and they are all machine readable.
This saves a lot of hassle for all parties involved.
It actually has created some hassles for many parties, including US citizens.
Previously, natural-born US citizens who had name arrangements where the last name was not necessarily the family name/surname would have almost no issue with using US passports when traveling internationally.
Another example of this "international standard" creating hassles is that many millions of non-US passports list as "place of birth" a place that is not the place of birth of most such non-US persons.