It is an historic moment as Tokyo decided to say goodbye to floppy disks. With more and more Government functions shifting to digital platforms, the Japanese Capital’s local authorities have started to stop using disks to store and move data.
According to a report in asia.nikkei.com, in fiscal 2021, Meguro Ward plans to put all work involving floppies and other physical storage media, online while similar changeover is expected from the Chiyoda Ward in the coming years.
In 2019, the Minato Ward had moved its payment procedures to online systems.
Tokyo’s officials are rather resistant to giving up floppy disks as the Central Government of the country wants complete digital transition.
Yoichi Ono of Meguro Ward, who manages public funds said the disks “almost never broke and lost data”. For a very long period, the Ward has been saving information on payments to employees on 3.5-inch floppies which were sent to the bank for processing.
What is amazing is that the adherence to this system continued even when manufacturers like Sony stopped making these disks almost a decade ago. These can be reused and the ward has enough stock in hand of these to continue, thereby hardly giving them any reason to expend time and money to upgrade.
What caused the ward to switchover in 2019 was Mizuho Bank’s decision to charge the ward 50,000 yen ($438 at current rates) per month for use of physical storage media, including floppies. Bank’s reason was the cost of maintaining disk readers and the comparative inefficiency and losing data when compared with online banking.
The extra expense of $5,000 a year goaded the ward to change. "This will save us the time of having each department save data to floppy disks and carry them around," Ono said.
In the case of Chiyoda Ward, the changeover is part of their complete programme to overhaul their systems by 2026. Switching completely to digital services is still a long way off. Shogo Hoshina, Chiyoda Ward accounting chief observed: “There are a lot of little things that need to be handled in fine detail.”
