Japan this week removed all regulations requiring the use of floppy disks for administrative purposes, catching up 13 years after the country’s manufacturers made their last units.
The floppy disk, invented in the 1970s, was once ubiquitous in computing. Since then, other forms of memory, such as flash drives and Internet cloud storage, have taken over. In the 1990s, along with the cassette tape, it was tossed into the dustbin of obsolete technology.
But not in Japan. While it is 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, such as fax machines and cash.
Japan began moving away from the storage devices of the 1900s — plastic-coated magnetic disks — just two years ago, when Taro Kono, the country’s digital minister, declared a “war on floppy disks.”
When she saw a picture of a roadside billboard advertising an American cancer clinic that read, “If you know what a floppy disk is, maybe it’s time to get a cancer screening,” Kono responded on social media: “No, not necessarily in Japan.”
In the southern city of Tsuwano, accounting department officials replaced their stack of floppy disks only in April 2023, according to Nobuyuki Koto, one of the officials.
The city’s new database took some time to set up, but the change was inevitable and the new system is faster and more accurate, he said.
A wide spectrum of businesses — mines, oil companies, retailers, liquor stores, shopping malls — were subject to different rules that required them to submit documents to regulators on diskettes.
Even after Sony, once a major manufacturer of disks for the Japanese market, stopped producing them in 2011, more than 1,000 laws, ordinances and directives requiring the use of floppy disks remained in effect, according to the Digital Ministry.
On Wednesday, Kono declared victory in his war. All those rules have been reviewed by lawmakers, submitted to public comment, voted on and repealed, he said.
The last rule in force was related to the recycling of used vehicles and was repealed on June 28, he said.
Outside the government, some Japanese sectors are not willing to budge.
Most of the traditional textile industry in one area of Kyoto that makes items such as kimonos has not updated its technology since adopting floppy disks in the 1980s, said Motoshi Honda, an analyst at the Kyoto Municipal Industrial Technology Research Institute.
Every day, Higo Bank, a regional financial institution on the island of Kyushu, processes about 300 floppy disks, which weigh nearly 10 pounds, according to Yusuke Murayama, a spokesman for the bank.
The bank has tried to persuade customers still using the drives to store their bank account information to change formats, telling them it would stop accepting them in the spring, he said.
Floppy disks are still in use outside Japan as well. They are used in the embroidery and avionics industries, and until recently, in the US nuclear arsenal.
In government, Kono’s work is not over. He has indicated that he is targeting fax machines, which are still widely used in Japan, and has recommended switching to email.
In Tsuwano, the town whose accounting department stopped using floppy disks last year, the office fax is still often the quickest way to send information, said Mr. Koto, the town clerk. Officials fax the names of deceased people to newspaper obituary departments and use the machines to contact local businesses.
“Sometimes people don’t pay attention to emails,” Koto said.
But even after finally ditching the floppy disks, I 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.”
