Taro Kono, newly appointed to the post of Japanese Minister in charge of Digital, has just declared war on computer diskettes, still widely used in the Japanese bureaucracy.
While the Land of the Rising Sun is renowned for being at the cutting edge of technology, it remains conservative in certain areas, such as bureaucracy.
Japanese bureaucracy clings to outdated technologies
Created at the end of the 1960s, the floppy disk was the heyday of computing for around thirty years before being overtaken by much more efficient means of storage. For comparison, more than 20,000 floppy disks would be needed to replicate the storage of a 32GB data USB flash drive…but that doesn’t stop Japan from continuing to use them.
” The digital minister declares war on floppy disks. There are about 1,900 government procedures that compel companies to use disks, i.e., floppy disks, CD-ROMs, MiniDisks, etc. to submit applications and other forms. The digital agency will change these rules so you can use them online tweeted Minister Taro Kono. He also specified that he had set up a working group to carry out this modernization.
Indeed, the exploitation of these obsolete technologies, in addition to slowing down procedures, can create real problems. In December 2021, for example, the Tokyo police lost two diskettes containing information on 38 applicants for social housing.
The minister wants to clean up to modernize the country
The floppy disk is not the only gadget that the Minister of Digital wants to part with. The Japanese are also very dependent on faxes and hankounique hand-cut seals on which the country has relied heavily during the COVID-19 pandemic.
The fact that the country remains attached to obsolete technologies is surprising when we know that it is particularly at the forefront of robotics. As explained by BBC, a weak digital culture as well as a bureaucracy with conservative attitudes can explain this norm. It’s not the first time the country has made headlines for such reasons, by the way: in 2018, the country’s cybersecurity minister admitted he had never used a computer, saying that he had always delegated IT tasks to his staff.
Sources: Ars-Technica, BBC
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