Japan may have no choice but to turn their back on the floppy for purely practical reasons. Sony, one of the leading manufacturers of the disks in the past, officially stopped producing them 11 years ago. Since then, most organizations have moved on to more advanced storage alternatives like USB-flash drives and cloud services. Even the U.S. The Department of Defense, which oddly holds a strong reputation as a late adopter to new computer tech, finally phased out floppy discs in 2019 after a gnarly five decades of use.
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Supply issues aside, floppy discs are increasingly impractical. Modern texts and spreadsheet files are significantly larger than those in the 80’s when floppys were in their prime.