In April 2021, Taro Kono, then Japan's minister for administrative and regulatory reform, announced that ministries in Kasumigaseki would stop using fax machines and switch to email. The cabinet's reform body followed up in June with a deadline of thirty June, after which no more thermal-paper handshakes would pass between the agencies that run the country. The directive went out on 7 June. The objections came back so quickly that the Hokkaido Shimbun stopped trying to count individual ministries and reported a round figure of more than four hundred formal complaints. A cabinet body, told by a minister to digitise, replied in writing that digitising would be "impossible."

The cabinet stood down. Exceptions widened until they swallowed the rule: disaster response, anything involving members of the public and businesses with established fax habits, anything touching the police or the courts. By July 2021 the fax-free ambition had become a footnote, and Kono moved on to the war he could win, against the floppy disk. By July 2024 the Digital Agency could announce that all 1,034 regulations governing floppy-disk submissions had been scrapped. Kono told Reuters they had won the war on floppy disks, and did not mention the other war.

The fax is still there, four years on. A November 2025 survey by Japan's education ministry put fax usage in public elementary and junior high schools at 71.7 per cent. The same survey found 91 per cent of schools requiring at least one hanko stamp on parental paperwork. A government policy from 2023 had named fiscal 2025 as the year both would end in education; fiscal 2025 came and went, and the numbers had moved by a few points at most.

The reason the fax survives is not really about fax. It is about what the fax delivers. A faxed document arrives as paper, already in the form a hanko can stamp, already physical enough to bind a hospital, a school, or a contractor to the words on it. The Group 3 standard most of these machines still run on was set in the early 1980s and has not been meaningfully updated since. That is its appeal: four decades of forensic familiarity, a log entry on both ends, and the comforting friction of a thing sent slowly enough that nobody can claim they did not notice it arrive.

Japan's bureaucratic trust infrastructure calcified around this combination of paper, stamp, and telephone-line acknowledgement. To pull the fax out is to pull out the load-bearing piece of a much older arrangement, and the ministries who filed those four hundred objections were not defending a machine. They were defending the procedure that machine certifies. In 2020 a respiratory specialist at a public hospital tweeted that COVID case numbers were still being handwritten and faxed to the health ministry, and the ministry relented within weeks. The fax ban, when it finally came in that narrow domain, came not from a digital minister but from a doctor with two thousand followers losing his patience in public.

Kono's loss in 2021 was not really a defeat by the fax. It was the moment a digital reform programme noticed that the analogue infrastructure it had inherited was not a habit but a legal order.

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