Beep is a basement nerd cave in Tokyo’s Akihabara district where affable staff engage with obsessive customers over old games, PCs and vintage electronics. It is also, following last week’s declaration of hostilities, a frontline in Japan’s new war on floppy discs.Head to the back corner of the shop, and for ¥10,000 ($71) you can acquire an unopened box of 50 Mitsubishi Chemical PC-98 MF2HDs discs — 3.5-inch gold from an almost obsolete, discontinued age and, quite suddenly, official enemies of the state.
The government’s declaration of war on these slivers of digital antiquity was issued by Taro Kono — a prime ministerial hopeful with a talent for stagecraft appointed digital minister in last month’s cabinet reshuffle. Though with more panache than others, Kono is taking up a familiar political baton: over the past couple of years, the ruling Liberal Democratic party has made a good (though unsuccessful) show of accelerating the demise of technological throwbacks that remain in embarrassingly widespread use in an otherwise cutting-edge society — most prominently the fax machine and carved “hanko” name seals.
Kono’s call for a “swift” end to reliance on the floppy disc (a technology first commercialised four decades ago which can hold less data than is consumed on a single iTunes song) came with a sensible account of both the problem and solution. The still extensive use of 3.5-inch floppy discs in Japan arises from regulations that stipulate methods by which data can legally be shared with officialdom.