This week, Foreign Minister Kono declared victory, telling Reuters, “We won the floppy disk war on June 28th!” Documents released by the Foreign Ministry back up this victory.
It may seem surprising that this fight is necessary, but Japan isn’t the only country where floppy disks are used: Norwegian doctors used them in 2015, and so did the US nuclear program a year later. British Airways Boeing 747-400s received critical updates via floppy disk as recently as 2020. And in San Francisco, just a stone’s throw from Silicon Valley, the city’s train system runs on floppies.
Yet Japan’s continued reliance on archaic technology is striking. It has long been known as a nation of innovation, and images of a futuristic utopia filled with robots, singing toilets and speeding bullet trains have become almost cliché. But it is also a country where flip phones remain popular even in the age of smartphones, and where workers protest the demise of fax machines. As experts say, this relationship with technology reflects both practical concerns and innovation. The deep-rooted values that allowed Japanese technology to flourish in the first place.
Kenji Kushida, Senior Fellow For Japanese Studies Carnegie Endowment for International Peace researchers say practical reasons for the slow adoption of new technology include a lack of incentives for governments and companies to update IT systems they invested in during the 1980s and 1990s, and the fact that Japan had thousands of “analog regulations” that required seemingly outdated processes for various official procedures, such as floppy disks, CDs, and even manual data transfers.
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“It really took political will” to rewrite those regulations, Kushida said.
But deeper than government regulations and bureaucracy, he says, is a kind of digital discomfort associated with the Japanese language. Kushida said filling out digital forms is difficult because the Japanese language uses three writing systems that don’t always translate well to digital interfaces. “It feels like 1,000 characters. “It’s a lot faster than just writing it and sending a fax,” he says.
Kushida said the impact is even greater in a society where older people who are not digital natives make up a large proportion of Japan’s population.
Ulrike Schade, a professor of Japanese business at the University of California, San Diego, also said language was a barrier. She also attributes it to “safety first,” Or “Safety First” — which she says is similar to a national motto.
“Generally, things have to be 100% proven before they are deployed,” Schade said in an email. “Mistakes, data leaks, and data loss are all very costly. Americans ignore those costs in the interest of progress, but the Japanese don’t.”
Koichi Nakano, Professor of Political Science, Sophia University The head of a Tokyo administrative scrivener’s office blames the government for using older technology on “underfunding of the administration,” citing budget and personnel shortages. More advanced technologies like USB or cloud storage “may have been considered too risky without better technical support,” he said in an email, adding that even if a floppy disk is left behind, “other people cannot open it even if they find it.”
He is a visiting professor at Waseda University in Tokyo and the author of “Japan America“, The prevalence of outdated technology is linked to another Japanese concept called “monozukuri,” which refers to the value placed on making physical things such as kimonos and lacquerware.
“Floppy disks are not exactly beautifully made,” he said with a laugh, “but they are still physical products that, if you take good care of them and keep them in good condition, can do something.”
“It’s much more reliable than this abstract cloud that you can’t hold in your hand,” Kelz added.
In many ways, Japan’s focus on physical design has proven to be an advantage. Japanese companies have thrived by designing groundbreaking hardware, from the Sony Walkman to the Nintendo Switch. Hayao Miyazaki, the globally acclaimed founder of animation studio Studio Ghibli, works “meticulously and by hand,” Kelts noted. And when we think of “high-tech Japan,” Kelts said, it’s often physical technology like bullet trains that actually come to mind.
That same focus on the tangible, which can sometimes feel outdated in the digital age, is also what drives Japan forward: “Japanese retro can actually be quite futuristic,” says Keltz.
