The Japanese authorities have canceled the latest rules, which contained requirements to send documents to government agencies on diskettes (flexible magnetic disks, floppy disks), writes the BBC.
“We have won the war with floppy disks,” said Taro Kono, the minister of digitalization of the country, who launched a campaign to abolish floppy disks in 2021.
Floppy disks, created in the 1960s, were widely used in Japanese government institutions. At the same time, Sony, the last manufacturer of this type of media, stopped producing them in 2011.
A standard floppy disk can hold 1.44 MB of data, reminds the BBC. In order to transfer information from a flash drive to 32 GB, more than 22,000 diskettes will be needed.
Attempts of digitization in Japan are met with resistance from conservative Japanese people. In particular, faxes were actively used in the country until recently, and the last pager operator in Japan stopped working only in 2019.