“The war against floppy disks has been won!” Japan declares victory in its effort to phase out analog technology

Tokyo: The Japanese government has finally eliminated the use of floppy disks in all its systems, two decades after their heyday, reaching a long-awaited milestone in its campaign to modernize the bureaucracy.

By the middle of last month, the digital agency had repealed all 1,034 regulations governing its use, with the exception of an environmental protection restriction related to car recycling.

“We won the war against floppy disks on June 28!” Digital Minister Taro Kono, who has been a vocal advocate for the abolition of fax machines and other analogue technology in the government, said Reuters in a statement on Wednesday.

The digital agency was founded during the Covid-19 pandemic in 2021, when the race to roll out nationwide testing and vaccinations made it clear that the government was still relying on paper filing and outdated technology.

Kono, a charismatic figure with 2.5 million followers on X, formerly headed the defense and foreign ministries and the Covid vaccine deployment and took up his current position in August 2022 after his bid to become prime minister failed.

But Japan’s digitization efforts have encountered numerous obstacles. A contact-tracing app flopped during the pandemic, and the rollout of the government’s “My Number” digital ID card has been slower than hoped due to repeated data breaches.