This week, Kono told Reuters: “We won the war against floppy disks on June 28!” A document released by his office confirmed the triumph.
While this battle may seem surprising, Japan is not the only country with floppy disks. Norwegian doctors were already using floppy disks in 2015, and a year later, the US nuclear program was using them as well. British Airways Boeing 747-400s were still receiving crucial updates via floppy disks as late as 2020. In San Francisco, a stone’s throw from Silicon Valley, the city’s rail network runs on floppy disks.
Japan, however, remains a country that relies on archaic technology. The country has long been known for its innovation, so much so that the idea of a futuristic utopian Japan filled with robots, singing toilets and bullet trains has become almost a cliché. But it is also the country where flip phones have long remained popular in the age of smartphones and where workers are protesting the elimination of fax machines. And, as experts say, this relationship with technology reflects both pragmatic concerns and societal concerns. the deeply held values that allowed Japanese technology to thrive in the first place.
Kenji Kushida, Senior Member for studies on Japan The author, a professor at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, highlighted a number of practical reasons for the slow adoption of new technologies, including the lack of incentive to update the computer systems that governments and businesses invested in in the 1980s and 1990s. The Japanese government also had thousands of “analog regulations” that imposed seemingly obsolete processes for various official procedures, such as transferring data via floppy disk, CD, or even by hand.
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“It really took political will” to rewrite those regulations, Kushida said.
But deeper than government rules or bureaucracy, he says, there is a kind of digital malaise tied to the Japanese language. It’s difficult to fill out digital forms in Japanese, which uses three writing systems that don’t always translate well to digital interfaces, Kushida said. “It feels like it’s 1,000 “It’s much faster to just write the document and then fax it,” he said.
This effect is compounded in a society where older people, who are not digital natives, make up a significant percentage of the Japanese population, Kushida said.
Ulrike Schaede, a professor of Japanese business at the University of California, San Diego, also said language was a barrier. to the adoption of new technologies, although she also attributes it to “anzen daiichi”, or “safety first” — which she says is akin to a national motto.
“In general, things have to be 100 percent proven before they can be deployed,” Schaede wrote in an email. “Mistakes, data leaks, data loss, all of that is very expensive. The Americans ignore these costs in the interest of progress, and the Japanese don’t.”
Koichi Nakano, professor of political science at Sophia University According to a Tokyo government official, the government’s use of outdated technology is due to “underfunding of public administration,” citing budget and personnel deficits. More advanced technologies such as USB flash drives or cloud storage “may have been considered too risky without better technical support,” he wrote in an email, adding that even if you misplace a floppy disk, “if others find it, they won’t be able to open it.”
For Roland Kelts, visiting professor at Waseda University in Tokyo and author of “Japanerica” The prevalence of obsolete technologies is linked to another Japanese concept known as monozukuri, which describes the value placed on the making of physical objects such as kimonos or lacquerware.
“A floppy disk is not necessarily a beautifully designed object,” he said with a laugh, “but it’s still a physical product, and something that, if you take care of it and keep it in good condition, will serve a function for you.”
“It’s much more reliable than this abstract cloud that you can’t hold in your hand,” Kelts added.
In many ways, Japan’s focus on physical design has proven to be an asset. Japanese companies have thrived on designing groundbreaking hardware, from Sony’s Walkman to the Nintendo Switch. Hayao Miyazaki, the founder of the internationally acclaimed animation studio Studio Ghibli, works “meticulously by hand,” Kelts notes. And when we imagine “high-tech Japan,” he said, what we actually think of are often physical technologies, like the bullet train.
That same attention to tangible things, which can seem so outdated in the digital age, is also driving Japan forward. As Kelts says, “Sometimes Japan’s retro style is actually quite futuristic.”
