Japan will no longer require floppy disks for submitting some official documents | Hacker News Reader

Japan will no longer require floppy disks for submitting some official documents

engadget.com

83 pointsthunderbong87 comments

Japan is insane on the paperwork front. The amount of stuff my wife has to deal with (because my Japanese is frankly terrible) for basic processes is mind numbing. Things like having to write out your address and contact info on five different forms for one appointment, visiting multiple offices to submit paperwork in for the same process, etc.. Moving apartments (heaven forbid it is to a different city government) involves weeks of straight up administrative work from one person in the household.

>Japan is insane on the paperwork front.

Worse than Germany?

What legal battles do you have to fight, to move apartements?

I remember, I had to file one paper from the landlord and my ID and that was it. Took 5 minutes.

I think you just need the Wohnungsgeberbestätigung from the landlord and fill the registration paperwork at the Bürgeramt (which, depending on your city, might be a bit hard to get an appointment), you might also need to take care of the TV bill stuff.

While not awful, comparing to Portugal, where I just need to register in a website an then wait to get a confirmation code by mail, it feels like going back to the stone age.

And then there's the US where is no legal requirement to have a permanent address even if, as a practical matter, you sort of need at least a quasi one.

Why do you need to "register" your address? Why do you need any of this?

I've found that's the question to ask with paperwork.

For instance, France is also extremely bad regarding paperwork and administrative red tape and people are so used to it that many can't imagine that many of it is not actually needed for society to function. I noticed when I moved to the UK: Suddenly all that was absolutely necessary to protect civilisation and the Republic (I only exaggerate a little bit) did not even exist and everything still ran smoothly.

Telling example: During the Covid lockdowns, the French administration decided that people had to fill and sign an official form to keep on them every time they left home. Basically "I swear that I am only doing my daily excercise. Date, signature" to be shown to any police officer who might ask, or "zut alors" you're nicked.

"Why do you need to "register" your address? Why do you need any of this?"

Control.

So the state knows in theory, who is living where.

With the joke being, that those institutions, where that information would actually be useful, don't know anyway. And so you still have to submit your adress everywhere (and then again, and a third time, to be sure).

Compared to the UK where you need to have some utility bills or bank statements as proof of an address, having an ID card with an address is a lot easier in practice.

But, yes, different societies have different approaches there and they are kind of designed around it.

> Compared to the UK where you need to have some utility bills or bank statements as proof of an address, having an ID card with an address is a lot easier in practice.

Well, no.

You already have bills in your name, so there is nothing to do.

On the other hand, regarding ID cards (in France): First there is no obligation to keep the address on it up-to-date (so why is there even an address on it?). Second, if you do want the address to be up-to-date then you need to follow the administrative procedure to get a new ID card, which involves providing... a proof of address in the form of an utility bill!

So France is different from Germany where you can get the address updated and you are supposed to do that. And proof of address is not a utility bill there, but either a form from your landlord or land register.

Same conclusion: You still have bills, tax bills, etc, so there is still no need for anything else if you wanted to keep things as simple as necessary.

> And proof of address is not a utility bill there, but either a form from your landlord or land register.

Because you've decided to do that, not because there is a practical requirement, which is my point.

Not really, as you still need to show a passport that you and the bills go together (which is still conjecture, to be honest, if the name is common). Why have two things?

Edit: because the decision was to have a strong ID system, so when people show an ID with an address the confidence is high in that being correct.

One advantage of this is e.g. that you do not have to register for elections at all in Germany. You get automatically notified of all elections based on your residence and can vote without further steps.

Some reasons that the state kinda needs to know where you live (at least in Germany) is for a number of reasons:

- so you can vote in local elections and they can send you your ballots

- taxes, as they depend on where you live (some tax rates can differ and more importantly it decides where your taxes go)

- security, so for example when you have an arrest warrant or have committed a crime, etc. the state knows where to send your fines, etc.

- planning of health services or education services requires the state to know where people actually live

Part of it is that there's just more of a tradition of keeping track of people in many places compared to the US. As a visitor staying in a hotel, you're shielded from a lot of it most places because the hotel takes care of it. But I was staying with a friend for a couple weeks recently in a European country, and they had to take my passport down to some office and fill out some paperwork.

jeez Wohnungsgeberbestätigung is a mouthful

"you might also need to take care of the TV bill stuff"

You mean what was formerly known as GEZ?

No worries, nowdays that got easier, they just help themself. In my case they just took the money straight from my bank account without consent or asking first, or without me even giving them my current account. (No idea how that was possible, it was the same account as some years ago, but I was living offroad for some time and never gave them permission, but suing them is a fools errand)

Having immigrated to both places: yes, much worse.

I know Germany always catches a lot of flack for bureaucracy, but changing my address in G was essentially pain free. The most adverse circumstances I have definitely encountered in the US of all places... Having rules is one thing. Having processes that are borderline broken, that's the real issue.

The fun thing about bureaucracy in the US is that you never know what to expect. Half the time it’s a kafkaesque hellscape, but the other half you come away astonished at how smooth and painless the experience was

I think this is somewhat helped that a lot of bureaucracy is split between federal and states. States aren't perfect by any means, and sometimes introduce extra steps if both state and federal are involved, but they also seem less inclined generally to have to consider a whole nation of people and are happy to have you fill out one form that hasn't changed much for 40 years and ... that's it.

It's certainly an interesting phenomenon how simple some things can be.

They wanna keep you on your toes :D

I'm doing taxes for the first time this year, wish me luck!

in order to change my address in the UK all I needed to do was to either send an email with some bill attached or just call (depending on the service).

considering that an appointment for changing your registered address in Germany can be booked online and than you only have to go in person so they can put the new address on your ID card, show them your "Wohnungsgeberbestätigung" (letter from the landlord that you actually live there when you rent, not needed when you own your house) and sign once that you actually moved there I would say it sounds worse than in Germany.

I hadn't even thought moving would take multiple pieces of paper ...

In the US it's just https://moversguide.usps.com/mgo/disclaimer?referral=UMOVE

And this isn't even "required".

You may have some utilities and other things like that. Driver's license/registration if you're moving states. But very little really that you legally need to do.

Also home insurance or renter's insurance. Legally required in plenty of places.

Mortgage companies typically require home insurance (and often pay it themselves from an escrow account so they can be sure it's up to date). It would surprise me if renter's insurance was generally required. Even if I have a nominal permanent address, I may not actually have a lease or spend much time there (if any).

The basic point is that most people in the US will want some permanent address where they can get mail etc. and is where they live from the perspective of official government documents. But they may not actually live there (and aren't required to).

This looks like a snail mail forwarding service? Surely that's not mandatory to move somewhere else? I've never used this in Europe (moved 5 times), just tell the places that need to send me physical mail my new address

It's not mandatory as far as ... nobody is going to let you move.

It does mean that you'll get your old mail delivered to your old place forwarded to your new place while the other folks mailing you get their ducks in a row. And honestly I can't think of all the places that might mail me.

Yeah I thought the topic was things you have to do to move, like registering in the new city and notifying the old country or so

Yeah I agree. But my point being it is a pretty tangential thing and also the first thing you think of in the US. The scale of "have to do" is really low, to the point that you start with something pretty easy and that's largely it as far as "official" moving activity.

Not mandatory, though it is nice because USPS also notifies the sender of your updated address and then most places automatically update the address so you don't have to. The main work you actually have to do is closing/opening new utility accounts and possibly update your drivers license/vehicle registration.

You can't use 'just' when the thing you're suggesting is more work.

But works. The post already doesn't sort a decent percentage of stuff correctly as it is, I'd never trust it to correctly identify which mail needs to go to me when some senders may put the first name, others the last name, others my name, others my partner's name, others including the cat's name as a joke, and others not including a name at all. The sender also needs to send something in the right timespan (before you stop ordering the service) in order to get your new address. This is also assuming nobody in your household shares a first or last name with the new inhabitants

Compared to what seems like a big mess of telling only the post and hoping everyone will get the memo from them, telling the utility, my employer, family, and a few insurances that I moved (updating the info on the self-service site or sending support an email) seems like the better solution to me

To be fair, the U.S. is very unique in that sense. No other society in the world is this uncommitted to one single place. Moving in the States is like getting lunch. Some extreme rent savers do nothing but move every year.

Even if the move process is frictionless, in most countries, it's just not a thing. You are "tied" to your family house or apartment, passed from generation to generation. Here, real estate is just a commodity.

More households in Germany (and I'm sure other places) rent than in the US. Not that I really disagree that the US is a pretty mobile society overall.)

It's very interesting to me that there's such a formal official residence type system in other countries (not sure what else to call it).

In the US it matters too to some extent, eligibility for elections if you want to hold office, your tax burden for states that tax property and so on. But there's not a super official universal office you need to declare it at with lots of paperwork or validation outside of say the given situation it applies to. If I ran for office I'd provide my address and there you go, no complex validation, or if I wanted to pay lower taxes because it is my primary residence ... I just say that's where I live. Those given processes are left to validate it if they wish.

Bureaucracy is a strange thing. We get comfortable with what we know and we can't think of it any other way and it becomes a bit of a revelation when we realize maybe we don't have to do all that ...

Basically, in the US, if you have a mailing address that can be where you "live." It may not be able to be a PO Box and, if you're a politician or otherwise high profile, someone may look into it. But if you're an ordinary Joe and you have a trusted relative/friend who will keep an eye out for important mail, that's mostly fine. A state could get cranky if they think you owe them taxes but mostly they'd have no way of knowing. You may need to do the odd thing in person but it's mostly very informal.

It's basically the same in Australia. Super convenient to move around as a renter. Basically just have to update your address with the voting database and your for your drivers license they send you a sticker to put on your license.

I've been moving almost once a year for the last few years just to try out new places and cities.

How does it work with taxation? As far as I know, states and cities have various tax rates, so how do they know who is supposed to tax you?

It's often one of the main reasons why they ask you to register in other countries.

Depending on the tax.

For say sales tax like things if you buy something online the address you ship it to usually determines that. So no effort required there. In person if you're in TX you pay the TX sales tax (if they have one), if you are in NY you pay the NY sales tax.

As far as filing taxes for a year goes (income tax, property tax) you file taxes (or maybe you don't) and there you go. Filling taxes is largely a sort of declaration of what you say you did and owe. It's up to the state or feds to validate if they wish.

Thanks. It looks like a trade-off between bureaucracy/monitoring and ease of fraud. I guess that's why the US seems to rely a lot more on property taxes than other countries, harder to evade.

For the purposes of government ID, you're going to have a principal residence. But, for ordinary people, there's no real guarantee that you actually live there. It could be a friend's house who keeps an eye out for important mail.

I live in Japan so deal with some of this. The attitude I've adopted is that the government officials are giving me free Japanese speech practice.

A week ago I just so happened to look up some of your older blog posts and Candy Japan articles that you had written, it was an enjoyable reread!

For anyone else, here are some links:

https://www.candyjapan.com/life-in-japan

https://www.candyjapan.com/behind-the-scenes

Having just spent many months in Japan, I can confirm this...the paper work was so involved it could have been satire. To change our address on our residence cards we need to do 'move out' paperwork in the old ward and bring that to the new one. Each visit takes the better part of a day. Dozens and dozens of people are working intensely behind the counter to service just a few customers.

Eventually I came to this explanation: their culture is obsessed with perfection, from perfectly paved roads to perfectly preserved temples to perfectly presented food, etc...but this pursuit of perfection in the hands of bureaucrats leads to processes where everything is captured in detail, approved by multiple people, etc. Basically, in the eyes of a bureaucrat, 'perfection' is a rock-solid paper-trail rather than a frictionless experience for the citizens.

I have a similar working theory.

This is a problem in many formal, detail-and-rule-obsessed cultures. Germany, like Japan, is lauded for its industrial engineering/manufacturing — but has the exact same hilarious obsession with government paperwork.

Meanwhile, more creative and permissive cultures — like say, Sweden (outsized influence on global fashion/culture/tech given its size), have far less paperwork.

Canada isn't so detail-and-rule-obsessed, but their civil service is friendly and inefficient. I much prefer the kind and well-executed Dutch bureaucracy, even as an expat here. Filing my taxes, even in a year in which I bought a house, took less than an hour. Canadian taxes were comparatively byzantine!

It sounds like they're all (government officials) just trying to keep their obsolete jobs alive by clinging to old methods of doing things under the guise of it being more reliable. Dozens of people don't need to service a few customers for perfection. The opposite. That's too many cooks in the kitchen. They need fewer people and fewer processes. The more convoluted the process, the higher likelihood of screw ups.

Is it the case in japan that they're "trying to keep their obsolete jobs alive"?

I find some people just love process and bureaucracy for its own sake and will ad it endlessly because they think it is their job, but not out of some effort to keep jobs going. There are countries where government spending is a political issue and a way to satisfy constitutions and keep things afloat, but Japan doesn't strike me as one of those.

That's a really well presented synopsis, it matches well to the anecdotes I've heard over the years.

How do you think this impacts the private sector? When delivering to a client, are similarly laborious levels of perfection expected?

That explanation is spot on. Japanese culture is indeed obsessed on perfection to the point it almost touches my Japanese nerve that "forms" outside Japan are just Word documents with brackets and underscores, that's just too casual! That's not what a form is(well, it is...)

> ... than a frictionless experience for the citizens.

And this is spot on as well. Most Japanese barely understand the need for that; seeking better experience is, basically, seen as a sign of weakness. Way more attention and cost are spared for preventing what are seen as improper and illegitimate, than seeking paths of least resistances or goals at all. Everyone's process people always.

Would you say that this is due to overzealous bureaucracy or does it have a point?

Since I'm not sure how much paper work you can do to confirm thst you are indeed moving away or loving in.

Also wondering if this could be elevated somewhat by having the form be digitalized as it is in certain European countries.

I hope it's not everything by hand.

I recently went looking for floppy disks in Akihabara, Tokyo. I needed them for a photography project and I didn't want to buy an entire box off Amazon (yeah, they are still available) since I only needed 2 at most.

Despite Akihabara having no shortage of retro hardware junk stores, even many with floppy disk drives for sale, finding actual floppy disks was surprisingly difficult. I did eventually find some, but only after asking multiple shop owners who swore they had seen some around their shop to then fail to find any. The last guy went digging behind the counter and eventually produced a dusty box of floppies with only about half remaining.

didn't they have them at yodobashi?

They may have them, it just didn't cross my mind so I went straight for the junk hardware stores. I had an afternoon to kill anyway and had fun looking at all the weird Japanese retro hardware.

yeah, it’s quite an experience what you’re describing. i loved it last time i was in akihabara.

going back to yodobashi, seeing all the current gen electronics ever under a single roof spread out across x storeys was something i haven’t seen in the west in quite some time. it was tiring (there’s so much stuff), but equally impressive.

This is the kind of intractable bureaucratic inertia people were worried about regarding the EU’s USB-C mandate. It remains to be seen how that plays out (partly given that the current state of USB-C implies it could Frankenstein forward for quite some time), but this is definitely a useful cautionary tale. The floppy mandate was probably a really progressive take at the time it was introduced.

Is there no way to have the best of both via some specified revisitation of the spec, or sunsetting of the original provision? It seems like a sunset period of 5 years would enforce the global switch without a permanent lock-in. Potential downside is that it might hamper development of alternatives, but that’s also the point.

That all sounds well and good until you're the department head of the 1000 person floppy processing division and it comes time to cut the entire division.

Perhaps in a really broad sense of "bureaucracies can be slow which make narrowly focused laws inherently risky because they might become outdated." But the actual constraint is quite different: "the government needs data in this format" vs. "your consumer device must provide this specific power delivery format".

The damage of the former is entirely contained to the act of producing the floppy disk. It sucks for each business when they have to make the 1 floppy disk but then the damage is done. With the USB mandate, the party producing the millions of devices is constrained going back to the design of their core product and then every person using it is constrained.

Bureaucracy has absolutely nothing to do with this. Japan likes its traditions to the point where it does not know when to stop and re-evaluate. The "bureaucracy" just follows the culture. After all, the bureaucracy is the people.

No one is enforcing the use of old-school fax machines, for example - businesses just have been reluctant to give it up.

> EU’s USB-C mandate

This is fake news /s

The law of the land is manufacturers all have to agree on a standard.

If Apple wants to bribe everyone to use lightning, or micro-usb, they are free to do so.

If tomorrow everyone wakes up and decides to use thunderbolt, they are free to do so.

I'm a bit confused. The directive specifically says USB-C [1].

[1] https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=uriserv%...

EU had a similar structure with micro-USB, and yet it managed to transition to USC-C without issue.

Haha!

I’ve ordered yesterday an unused old external floppy-drive (IBM) and a set of floppies (Sony). More for fun than on purpose. By the way you need them everywhere where stuff remains a long time usable e.g. the older B747-400 or trains, plants and heavy machines and so on.

I hoped that SD-Cards replace them because the slip into a slot (other than USB-Thumbsdrives), have defined speed-classes and you can write on their outside what is stored on them. Cars, cameras, bike-computers and so on use them everywhere but computer manufacturers failed to built them in or connect them properly via USB (I refer especially to Lenovo which connected the card-slots via PCI which prevented booting from them…).

Honestly. I don’t like optical disks. They allowed for higher capacity but they were like multiple steps backward and a huge waste of material. Mostly one time writeable, a lot of material required, big form factor and writing them was also complex. Optical disks are like technology which should have skipped over? I even myself bought once a mini-disc player…wasted money.

> . I don’t like optical disks. They allowed for higher capacity but they were like multiple steps backward and a huge waste of material.

Oh no, optical disk is superior - I can backup family photos to M-disk and shove it in a bank vault, and in 100 years it will still work.

Just like photos, I have family photos that are 60 years old. Digital photos of 10 years old are lost

How are you gonna store a video for 50 years? flash memory discharges, hard disks rust, upload to google drive and hope they don’t kill the service?

I don’t care here for long term storage but let it us pick up?

As far as I know flash memory should last at least ten years. After that period of time I would either copy the data, erase and write again or look for other tech. So this requires manual intervention.

Which other? Magnetic tapes are often used for this purpose. Microfilms shall be much better. Paper is really resilient.

I would avoid any cloud, Google has a bad track record. The online access and requirements make it unreliable. In best case the don’t try to search the data or delete it by accident. As they did already.

As far as I know CDs last only ten years. DVDs maybe 30 years. I’ve it is a -ROM it last likely 100 years. But therefore you need special equipment. The M-Discs you mention are new for me but this sounds good. Are regular drives guaranteed to read it?

The most problematic thing isn’t just keeping the data. We also need to be able to read it again. Maybe we need to use good old stones ^^

If it isn’t broken, don’t fix it.

Until the definition of broken changes.

Well, something can be functional only as long as the hypothesis made on the operating environment are relevant. After what it becomes broken by obsolescence.

If a device relies only on fundamental physical hypothesis, surely it can certainly go pretty far. Look how pyramids are still great landing facility to this days. Too bad that the hi-erratic art of building the matching spaceships was lost since then — but that’s how it goes when you run for the high sophistication in your design.

It's a pitty. A floppy disk requires you to remain concise, 1.44MB, that's barely above 140 characters in a docx file!

Are floppy disks still being manufactured or are they like the Japanese population? Aging and dying off. Next on their list should be fax machines over there.

They haven't been made in more than a decade. A guy in the US (floppydisk.com) acquired a few million disks, but I read his supply will run out in a few years.

Does go to show how long lasting they are.

During the pandemic people in Japan had to travel to get documents stamped

Sounds like there should be a use case for high density qr codes instead

How could that possibly work!? (joke attempt, I read the article)

I wonder if you can still fax them over?

Are they upgrading to Iomega ZIP drives? /s

Seems too common as a format. Better stick to Iomega Clik/PocketZip instead if you want something obscure.

Now, now... they're not that antiquated! CD-R at least... or DVD-RAM

More fitting would be Sonys Memory Stick...

Sony has the worst case of not-invented-here syndrome. If they released a great mp3 player before Apple we could be living in a very different world. Instead they forced you to convert your MP3s to ATRAC.

No, in Japan the popular system were the magneto-optical disks.

Also MiniDisc, my car still has a MiniDisc player

The direct-debit form for my daughters school fees had the option for the school submitting the information via MO (Magneto-Optical) (along with paper, floppy, dvd and data transfer) https://bitbang.social/@kalleboo/111821793740460988

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magneto-optical_drive

Reply on news.ycombinator.com