Japan dropped all regulations requiring the use of floppy disks for administrative purposes this week, marking the milestone 13 years after the country’s manufacturers built their last drives.
The floppy disk, invented in the 1970s, was once a ubiquitous part of computers. Other forms of memory, such as flash drives and online cloud storage, have since taken over. In the 1990s, along with the tape, it was thrown into the dustbin of obsolete technology.
But not in Japan. While it’s famous for its consumer electronics giants, robots and some of the world’s fastest broadband networks, the country is also wedded to floppy disks and other old technologies like fax machines and cash.
Japan began moving away from the storage devices of the 1900s, magnetic disks encased in plastic, only two years ago, when Taro Kono, the country’s digital minister, declared a “war on floppy disks.”
When confronted with an image of a highway billboard for a US cancer clinic that read: ‘If you know what a floppy disk is, it might be time for your cancer screening’, Mr Kono responded on social media: ‘No, no necessary in Japan.”
In the southern city of Tsuwano, accounting officials only replaced the floppy disk stack in April 2023, according to Nobuyuki Koto, one of the officials.
The city’s new database took some time to settle in, but the change was inevitable and the new system is faster and more accurate, he said.
A wide range of businesses — mines, oil companies, retailers, liquor stores, malls — were bound by different rules that required them to submit documents to regulators on floppy disks.
Even after Sony, once a major maker of discs for the Japanese market, stopped producing the discs in 2011, more than 1,000 laws, ordinances and directives mandating floppy disks remained on the books, according to the Ministry of Digital Services.
On Wednesday, Mr. Kono declared victory in his war. All of those regulations have been reviewed by lawmakers, submitted for public comment, voted on and repealed, he said.
The last rule in place was about recycling used vehicles and was repealed on June 28, he said.
Outside the government, some Japanese sectors are not ready to give up.
Most of the traditional textile industry in one part of Kyoto, which makes items such as kimonos, has not updated its technology since it adopted floppy disks in the 1980s, said Motoshi Honda, an analyst at the Kyoto Municipal Institute of Industrial Technology.
Every day, Higo Bank, a regional financial institution on the island of Kyushu, processes nearly 300 floppy disks, which weigh nearly 10 kilograms, according to Yusuke Murayama, a spokesman for the bank.
The bank tried to persuade customers who still use the discs to store their bank account information to switch formats, telling them it would stop accepting them in the spring, he said.
Floppy disks still exist outside of Japan. The embroidery and avionics industries use them, and until recently the United States nuclear arsenal did too.
Within the government, Mr. Kono’s work is not done. He has indicated that fax machines, which are still widely used in Japan, are in his sights. He recommended switching to email.
In Tsuwano, the city whose accounting department was upgraded from floppy disks last year, the office fax machine is still often the fastest way to send information, said Mr. Koto, the city official. Officials fax the names of people who died to newspaper obituaries and use the machines to correspond with local businesses.
“Sometimes, people don’t notice emails,” Mr. Koto said.
But even after he finally got rid of the floppy disks, he still missed some things about the old system.
“There was no risk of being hacked,” he said. “Now we have to be careful about data security.”
