Japan Declares Victory in “War” Against Floppy Disks

It took until 2024, but Japan finally said goodbye to floppy disks.

Until last month, people were still being asked to submit documents to the government using outdated storage devices, with more than 1,000 regulations requiring their use.

But those rules were eventually dropped, Digital Minister Taro Kono said.

In 2021, Mr. Kono “declared war” on floppy disks. On Wednesday, nearly three years later, he announced: “We have won the war on floppy disks!”

Mr Kono has made it a goal to eliminate old technology since his appointment, having previously said he would “get rid of the fax machine”.

Once considered a technology powerhouse, Japan has lagged behind the global wave of digital transformation in recent years due to a deep resistance to change.

For example, workplaces continued to favor fax machines over email – earlier plans to remove such machines from government offices were abandoned due to resistance.

The announcement was widely discussed on Japanese social media, with one user on X, formerly known as Twitter, calling the disks “a symbol of an anachronistic administration.”

“The government still uses floppy disks? It’s so outdated… I guess they’re just full of old people,” read another comment on X.

Other comments were more nostalgic. “I wonder if the floppy disks will start showing up on auction sites,” wrote one user.

Created in the 1960s, the square-shaped devices fell out of favor in the 1990s as more efficient storage solutions were invented.

A 3.5-inch floppy disk could only hold 1.44 MB of data. More than 22,000 of these disks would be needed to reproduce a USB flash drive storing 32 GB of information.

Sony, the last disc manufacturer, stopped production in 2011.

As part of its belated push to digitize its bureaucracy, Japan launched a Digital Agency in September 2021, headed by Mr. Kono.

But Japan’s digitalization efforts may be easier said than done.

Many Japanese businesses still require official documents to be signed with engraved personal stamps, called hanko, despite government efforts to phase them out.

People are moving away from the stamps at a “glacial pace,” local newspaper The Japan Times said.

It was only in 2019 that the country’s last pager provider shut down its service, with the last private subscriber explaining that it was his elderly mother’s preferred means of communication.