As the Japanese government, which had been the only one in use, abolished regulations requiring the use of floppy disks, floppy disks can no longer be found in Japan. Currently, data is stored through USB or external hard drives in most countries.
According to local foreign media including Mainichi Shimbun on Tuesday, Japan’s digital affairs minister Taro Kono recently announced that the government will completely abolish regulations requiring the use of floppy disks in administrative procedures by the end of this month. Of the 1,034 provisions requiring the submission or preservation of existing floppy disk data, all but one case that the Ministry of Environment is undergoing the revision of enforcement ordinance has been abolished. If this one case is abolished at the end of this month, the procedure that requires the use of floppy disks will be completely eliminated.
Floppy disks enjoyed their heyday as a PC storage device until the 1990s. However, they began to disappear after the 2000s with the advent of CDs and other devices that supplemented the smaller capacity (1.44 MB) and improved efficiency. According to the Japan Storage Media Industry Association, the global sales of floppy disks in 2006 amounted to 700 million, down two-thirds from the peak of 2 billion in 1998.
Domestic companies that used to produce floppy disks such as Samsung has also stopped production since the 2000s, and even Sony, the last producer, stopped operating its production line in March 2011, leaving no new production for nearly 15 years.
Although production has already been suspended, Japan still had to use floppy disks to submit data or store data. As a result, companies that had to submit data to government offices for administrative processing had difficulty finding floppy disks that were difficult to obtain. Currently, the only way to obtain a floppy disk is to purchase inventory produced 15 years ago. Japan’s analog-centered culture, which had to go to work to stamp documents despite the spread of telecommuting due to the COVID-19 pandemic, has become a hot topic around the world.
Currently, the Japanese government is looking into analogue regulations, including demands for the use of floppy disks and mandatory entry of employees. About 70% of them, including both regulations that must be handled by law and regulations based on public notice, are said to have already been reviewed.
When Kono took office in August 2022, he declared that he would break the outdated practice of using old storage media such as paper, fax machines and floppy disks, and accelerate the digital transformation of administration. Since then, he has strongly expressed his willingness to expel floppy disks through social networking services (SNS), saying, “I declare war on floppy disks.”
JULIE KIM
US ASIA JOURNAL
