Japan, a Longtime U.S. Cybersecurity Concern, Just Stopped Using Floppy Disks

Japan’s “digital minister,” Kono Taro, announced Wednesday that the Japanese government no longer uses floppy disks to store data.

Japan’s reliance on the outmoded technology has long been a major concern for allied cybersecurity experts.

“We have won the war on floppy disks on June 28!” Kono proclaimed on Wednesday, pointing to that date as the moment when the last regulations governing the use of floppy disks were eliminated and when the final disk drive stopped spinning for good.

Kono, now 61, is a former defense and foreign affairs minister who took charge of the Digital Ministry soon after it was created in 2021. Then-Prime Minister Suga Yoshihide established the agency after the Wuhan coronavirus pandemic greatly increased worldwide reliance on digital communications, forcing Japan to contend with how much of its bureaucracy was still rooted in an analog world.

Japan has a reputation as a tech pioneer and computer science powerhouse, but its government is actually very risk-averse and resistant to change. The bureaucracy was still using floppy disks because it felt they worked well enough for its needs. The system was not broken, so it refused to fix it.

Kono was such a perfect avatar for Japan’s digital transformation — a fusion of respectable maturity and childlike glee at the wonderful toys he gets to play with — that he might as well have been created in a laboratory.

As a matter of fact, a robot duplicate of him was built in a laboratory, and he merrily posed with it for selfies. Kono talked about sending his robot double to dreary budget meetings in his place. Later, he suggested Robo-Kono would be a great spokesdroid for the government’s national identification campaign because it would show people how easily they might be impersonated if they do not carry proper identification.

The ID card, known as the My Number Card, has run into a number of snags since then, but, in May 2024, it crossed an important hurdle when Apple agreed to integrate its functions into the iPhone.

Kono saw the War on Floppy Disks as one of his most important missions, in part because the government’s insistence on using the archaic technology was holding back Japanese private industry.

“There is no analog thing left in our remarkably advanced society. Oops, my fax machine is jamming!” he quipped on social media in August 2022, causing some irritation among fellow ministers who did not like being mocked for their reliance on old technology.

Corporate systems must interface with government systems, so Japan’s cutting-edge digital titans had to grit their teeth and keep using floppies — and fax machines, and reams of dead-tree paperwork, and even the hanko, a traditional carved stamp Japan has been using on important documents for centuries.

“Japan was quite good with analog technology, but when things moved to digital, we were too content with analog things, so we didn’t invest enough,” Kono observed in May 2023.

At that time, Japan had more than 9,000 government regulations requiring the use of outmoded technologies, including one that required certain forms to be submitted with an old-fashioned film-roll color photo of the person who filled them out.

Kono proudly announced on Wednesday that the last of those cobwebbed regulations had been wiped out. The last to fall was a vehicle recycling system that still mandated floppy disks until it was put out of its misery on June 28.

Japanese government systems have been hit by a few high-profile cyberattacks in recent years that raised questions in the U.S. and other allied nations about the security of Japan’s mixture of advanced electronics and antiquated technologies.

In August 2023, a suspected Chinese military cyberattack on the Japanese Defense Ministry prompted grumbling from U.S. officials that Japan had become a “spy heaven” because of its weird data processing architecture.

In February 2024, Japanese government sources admitted that Chinese hackers had been able to steal classified diplomatic cables from the Foreign Ministry. Japanese media noted that the United States was growing “hesitant to share defense-related information with Japan” until its data security was improved.