Japan’s digital minister has declared war on floppy disks, decades after the technology became largely obsolete, but could encounter opposition from nostalgic devotees inside the country’s vast bureaucracy.
Taro Kono said he would expand his quest to rid the bureaucracy of outdated tools by phasing out disks and moving administrative procedures online.
Kono, who has already made clear his disdain for fax machines and hanko personal seals, said businesses were still required to use disks to complete 1,900 government-related procedures such as submitting applications and other documents.
“Digital Minister declares a war on floppy discs,” he said in an English-language tweet on Wednesday.
“[The] Digital Agency is to change those regulations so you can use online.”
Kono told reporters this week that his agency would be reviewing the use of floppy and other disks “swiftly”, adding that the modernisation push had the support of the prime minister, Fumio Kishida.
Japan is not alone in hanging on to floppy disks long after most businesses and public bodies deemed them outmoded. The US air force only replaced the floppy disks it had used to manage the country’s nuclear arsenal in 2019, almost a decade after Sony stopped manufacturing them.
After he was made digital affairs minister in a cabinet reshuffle earlier this month, Kono joked about the task of dragging Japan’s bureaucracy into the digital age. “C’mon, there is no analogue thing left in our remarkably advanced society,” he tweeted in response to a comment about his appointment. “Oops, my fax machine is jamming!”
But there is no guarantee that Kono, a former foreign minister who has been tipped as a future prime minister, will drive out floppy disks altogether.
In 2021, when administrative reform minister, he launched a personal crusade against hanko – official seals that are used to sign contracts and other documents – and fax machines, which he blamed for burying national and local government bureaucrats in mountains of paper.
Government ministries were asked to end hanko requirements for hundreds of procedures, including year-end tax adjustments and tax returns, but reports say the seals and fax machines are still in use.
Kono’s digital revolution has encountered resistance from officials who believe physical media offer a degree of authenticity that an email does not, while politicians in a region known for producing intricately carved hanko accused him of attacking a “symbol of Japan”.
Hundreds of government offices said banishing fax machines would be “impossible”, media reports said, citing concerns over the security of sensitive information and “anxiety over the communication environment” if they switched exclusively to email.
Floppy disks, too, have their champions.
The disks “almost never broke or lost data”, Yoichi Ono, an official in Tokyo’s Meguro ward, told Nikkei Asia last year when the local government decided to phase out floppies and other physical storage data.
The ward had previously saved information on payments to employees on floppies that were then taken to the bank for processing. Chiyoda, another Tokyo ward, said it would follow suit “within the next few years”, according to the Nikkei.