Japan’s Nihon Keizai Shimbun reported on Wednesday that the Japanese government has been seeking electronicization of official documents for seven years, but it has not been popularized yet. The Japanese government is constantly looking for familiar paper documents due to its culture of preferring analog methods.
According to the report, about 60 percent of the official documents made by Kasumigaseki, Tokyo, where Japan’s central administrative departments gather, are paper documents. It is common to print out documents written on an electronic payment system on approval or to distribute them on paper during face-to-face meetings. The official document manager of Japan’s Ministry of Justice even posted a notice to executives in November last year, asking them to use the electronic payment system.
The Japanese government has promoted electronicization of official documents since 2018 to increase administrative work efficiency. The problem of concealing daily report documents of the U.N. Peacekeeping Forces (PKO) in South Sudan was the starting point. Japan’s Ministry of Defense did not disclose the daily activity report document prepared by the Self-Defense Forces in South Sudan in 2017, saying that there was a “conflict” or a “shooting incident.” The Ministry of Defense claimed that the document was destroyed, but later discovered and released some of the documents stored on the computer, revealing that the existing claims were false. As a result, voices have been raised that the electronicization of official documents should be promoted in order to prevent the possibility of forgery or loss of official documents. However, Japanese government officials reportedly do not use the government’s electronic payment system very well. According to statistics from the Cabinet Office in 2023, only 36.2 percent of the documents newly written by all ministries in the same year were electronic documents. If the scope is expanded to include all preserved documents, electronic documents have fallen further to 19 percent. In the case of the Ministry of Justice and the Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare, which are the slowest in electronicization, the proportion of electronic documents among all preserved documents was less than 5 percent.
Government insiders cite delays in electronicization of administrative offices or local branch offices as reasons. For example, the Justice Ministry’s local law office points out that electronicization rather reduces work efficiency as a large number of documents applied for registration of real estate and corporations come in as paper documents. Another problem is that the government has decided to implement electronicization by the opening of the new National Archives in 2019 for electronic purposes, but failed to provide details or figures. Furthermore, the opening of the National Archives has been postponed to 2029. The Nihon Keizai Shimbun pointed out, “It is an urgent task to break away from paper culture, a symbol of inefficiency, but the enthusiasm for electronicization is not growing.”
SOPHIA KIM
US ASIA JOURNAL
