Japan announces victory over floppy disks

This week, Kono declared his victory to Reuters: “We won the war against floppy disks on June 28!” A document released by his office confirmed the triumph.

While it may seem surprising that this battle had to be fought, Japan is not the only place where floppy disks are lying around. Norway’s doctors were using floppy disks in 2015, and the United States’ nuclear program was using them a year later. British Airways’ Boeing 747-400s were still receiving critical updates via floppy disks as of 2020. In San Francisco, just a stone’s throw from Silicon Valley, the city’s train system runs on floppy disks.

Still, Japan’s continued reliance on archaic technology is striking. The country has long been known for its innovation, so much so that the idea of ​​Japan as a futuristic utopia full of robots, singing toilets and speeding bullet trains has become almost a cliché. But it is also the country where flip phones remained popular well into the smartphone era and where employees protested the abolition of fax machines – and as experts say, this relationship with technology reflects both pragmatic concerns and the deep-rooted values ​​that made Japanese technology so successful.

Kenji Kushida, a senior fellow for Japanese Studies of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace cites a number of practical reasons for the slow adoption of new technologies, including a lack of incentives to update the IT systems that governments and businesses invested in during the 1980s and 1990s. The Japanese government also had thousands of “analog regulations” that prescribed seemingly outdated processes for various official procedures – such as data transmission by floppy disk, CD, or even by hand.

“It really took political will” to rewrite such regulations, Kushida said.

But deeper than government regulations or bureaucracy, he said, there is a kind of digital unease surrounding the Japanese language. difficult to fill out digital forms in Japanese because it uses three writing systems that do not always translate well to digital interfaces, said Kushida. “It feels like it is 1,000 times faster than just writing it down and then sending a fax,” he said.

This effect is amplified in a society where older people who are not digital natives make up a large proportion of the Japanese population, Kushida said.

Ulrike Schaede, professor of Japanese business administration at the University of California in San Diego, also said that language was an obstacle to introduce new technologies, although she also attributes it to “anzen daiichi”, or “safety first” – which they believe is something of a national motto.

“In general, things have to be 100% proven before they can be introduced,” Schaede wrote in an email. “Mistakes, data leaks, lost data are all very costly. The Americans ignore these costs in the interest of progress, the Japanese do not.”

Koichi Nakano, Professor of Political Science at Sophia University in Tokyo attributes the government’s use of old technologies to “underfunding of public administration,” citing budget and staffing shortfalls. More advanced technologies such as USB sticks or cloud storage “may have been considered too risky without better technical support,” he wrote in an email, adding that even if you misplace a floppy disk, “others won’t be able to open it if they find it.”

For Roland Kelts, visiting professor at Waseda University in Tokyo and author of “Japanamerica”, The proliferation of outdated technologies is related to another Japanese concept called monozukuri, which describes the value placed on the production of material things such as kimonos or lacquerware.

“A floppy disk is not necessarily a beautifully crafted thing,” he says with a laugh, “but it is still a physical product and something that serves a purpose if you take care of it and keep it in good condition.”

“It’s much more reliable than this abstract cloud that you can’t hold in your hand,” Kelts added.

In many ways, the country’s focus on physical design has proven to be a strength. Japanese companies have thrived by developing groundbreaking hardware, from the Sony Walkman to the Nintendo Switch. Hayao Miyazaki, the internationally acclaimed founder of animation studio Studio Ghibli, works “meticulously by hand,” Kelts notes. And when we think of “high-tech Japan,” he says, we often actually think of physical technologies, such as the bullet train.

The same focus on tangible things that can seem so old-fashioned in the digital age is also what drives Japan forward. As Kelts puts it, “Sometimes Japan’s retro is actually quite futuristic.”