I'm assuming it pre-dates Rubygems because it really should be a gem. I can't speak for Japan but few people in the Western world seem to use it.
Or maybe it would be a hard task that didn't justify the effort.
It's now no longer technically stdlib, but a "default gem", a gem that is installed by default with ruby, see: https://stdgems.org/
Since a few years every version remove one or two rarely used default gems. The Ruby core team just doesn't like big breaking changes.