“Tokyo Says Long Goodbye to Beloved Floppy Disks: Reliability Cherished by Bureaucrats, but Maintenance Fees Had Become a Burden”, 2021-10-23 (; backlinks):
Meguro Ward plans to put all work involving floppies and other physical storage media online in fiscal 2021, and Chiyoda Ward plans a similar transition within the next few years. Minato Ward moved its payment procedures from floppies to online systems in 2019.
…This system survived even after floppies themselves disappeared from the market. Sony, one of the earliest suppliers of 3.5-inch floppy disks, stopped making them a decade ago. Floppies can be reused, and the ward had plenty on hand, giving it little reason to deal with the time and expense of upgrading to new systems.
That changed in 2019, when Mizuho Bank informed the ward that it would begin charging 50,000 yen ($438 at current rates) per month for use of physical storage media, including floppies.
The bank cited the end of production and the cost of maintaining disk readers and pointed out the relative inefficiency and risk of lost data involved compared with online banking.
The prospect of spending roughly an extra $5,000 a year pushed the ward to make the switch for all work involving outside systems. “This will save us the time of having each department save data to floppy disks and carry them around”, Ono said…A full switch to digital services remains a long way off, given the time that will be needed to handle tasks such as digitizing paper contracts. “There are a lot of little things that need to be handled in fine detail”, according to Chiyoda Ward accounting chief Shogo Hoshina.