Japan Announces End of Floppy Disk Use in Government Systems

TapTechNews July 3rd news, it has been twenty years since the heyday of floppy disks. The Japanese government finally announced that it will no longer use floppy disks in all its systems, marking a big step in promoting the modernization process of government agencies. In the middle of last month, the Digital Agency of Japan had abolished all 1,034 regulations regarding the use of floppy disks except for one environmental protection regulation related to vehicle recycling.

The Japanese Digital Minister, Kono Taro, who has been advocating the elimination of analog technologies such as fax machines in government departments, told Reuters in a statement on Wednesday: We achieved the 'victory' over floppy disks on June 28!

In 2021, during the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Digital Agency of Japan was established. At that time, the problem that government departments relied heavily on paper documents and outdated technologies in order to carry out testing and vaccination work quickly across the country was exposed.

TapTechNews noticed that Kono Taro has 2.5 million followers on the social media platform X. He has served as Japan's Minister of Defense and Minister of Foreign Affairs, and was responsible for the deployment of COVID-19 vaccines. After failing to run for prime minister in August 2022, he took on his current position.

However, the digitalization process of the Japanese government is not all smooth sailing. The contact tracing application launched by the country during the epidemic did not work well, and the MyNumber digital ID card issued by the government has a lower than expected penetration rate due to repeated data leakage incidents.