Japan's digital minister declares 'war' on humble floppy disk in new digital push

Japan’s digital minister, who’s vowed to rid the bureaucracy of outdated tools from the hanko stamp to the fax machine, has now declared “war” on a technology many haven’t seen for decades — the floppy disk.

The hand-sized, square-shaped data storage item, along with similar devices including the CD or even lesser-known mini disk, are still required for some 1,900 government procedures and must go, digital minister Taro Kono wrote in a Twitter post Wednesday.

“We will be reviewing these practices swiftly,” Kono said in a news conference Tuesday, adding that Prime Minister Fumio Kishida has offered his full support. “Where does one even buy a floppy disk these days?”

A working group of the government’s Digital Extraordinary Administrative Advisory Committee is considering abolishing such designations to promote online application filing.

The working group has found about 1,900 clauses of laws, government, ministerial and other ordinances stipulating that specific storage devices, such as floppy and magneto-optical disks, be used to make administrative applications and keep data.

Japan isn’t the only nation that has struggled to phase out the outdated technology — the U.S. Defense Department only announced in 2019 that it had ended use of floppy disks, first developed in the 1960s, in a control system for its nuclear arsenal. Sony Group stopped making the disks in 2011 and many young people would struggle to describe how to use one or even to identify one in the modern workplace.

Legal hurdles are making it difficult to adopt modern technology like cloud storage for wider use within the bureaucracy, according to a presentation by the government’s digital task force dated Tuesday. The group will review the provisions, and plans to announce ways to improve them by the year-end.

The committee also launched a legislation screening team to examine whether new laws include outdated analog regulations that do not fit a digital society.

The screening will begin with bills to be submitted to an extraordinary session of parliament, which is slated to be held in autumn.

Kono said any opposition from ministries or agencies, if there is any, “will be pushed down.”

Kono, one of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party’s most visible politicians who is often cited by voters as a contender to be prime minister, has been an outspoken critic of bureaucratic inefficiencies due to archaic practices, most notably the fax machine and the hanko — a unique, carved red stamp that remains necessary to sign off official documents like a marriage license. He tried to curb use of both when he was administrative reform minister between 2020 and 2021, but the two are still widely used.

“I’m looking to get rid of the fax machine, and I still plan to do that,” Kono quipped at his news conference Tuesday.

hanko stamps are not going out of fashion anytime soon.

Say a package is delivered to your door. Instead of signing for it, you just use your little stamp to indicate receipt.

Think of a rubber stamp with your signature on it, but with a face about the size of a dime.

Dealing with older tech like this is an interesting problem. Another is that you pretty much have to eventually transfer data to newer formats. This is a huge issue. Let's say you had some corporate data that was stored on floppies. As technology advanced, if you didn't want to lose that data, you needed to copy all of the data to new media. My personal progression for this kind of thing was from floppies to cdroms, then from cdroms to DVDs. Now I pretty much use hard drives for long term archival, though for some really important stuff SD cards are preferred.

One issue that you run into is finding older data. You have to file things intelligently, or the data might as well not exist, because you can't locate it when you need it. The amount of data lost either because the old media became corrupted, or simply can't be located is pretty much incalculable. This has always been the case, even when stuff was on paper. Unless the data is well organized, it can never be located. It is also susceptible to damage to water, fire, mold, and other stuff.

NASA has lost so much data due to bit-rot while records were sitting on old 1/2" and 9-track tape, that's its really not funny.

This is an ongoing problem in society. Sometimes, important stuff is lost due to mismanagement, sometimes it's not so important. I have a couple of old tapes (IIRC, they were QIC tapes) that I would really love to get transferred to something newer, but basically lost out because the window on the tech pretty much closed before I could do so unless I want to spend stupid amounts of money attempting to recover it.

Things like real estate transaction records (which are necessary to get clear title) have pretty much vanished into digital smoke because people weren't thinking ahead about data preservation.

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