In my head as a person born in the 1970s, Japan is a paragon of a country that is considered sophisticated in terms of the use of technology. It is the reason why the look east policy was started by Tun Dr Mahathir because he wanted Malaysia to use the latest technology like Japan in daily life.
But the reality is that in 2023, Japan is an outdated country that still requires cash payments, fax machines and documents to be submitted in a physical storage medium for all official government business.
After stepping into 2024, Japan's Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI) has finally stopped requiring people, companies and organizations to send documents on floppy disks and compact disks for processing purposes. A total of 34 ordinances have been changed to allow the submission of documents only digitally after this. METI will be the pioneer ministry to start the era of non-physical storage in Japan. It will then be gradually expanded to other ministries.
This is because there are nearly 2000 ordinances and protocols dealing with the Japanese government that require physical storage to be sent. This cannot be changed overnight as it is a protocol that has been used for decades. It has become so habitual that it becomes difficult to change. The change was only made in the last three years because Sony stopped production of floppy disks and the 1.4MB storage was too small for modern documents.
The move to digitize Japanese government affairs was initiated by Japan's Digital Minister, Taro Kono in 2022. Tokyo became the first city in Japan to stop the need for physical storage in business in 2021. Surprisingly the need to deal with government departments using fax machines also only ended in knew 2021 but received objections from various agencies at that point.