Japan’s new prime minister drags government into the digital era

HIRAI TAKUYA keeps a tablet computer propped on his desk and an Apple Watch on his wrist. It is an unusual look for a Japanese politician. As Japan’s new minister of digital reform, his task is to make the stubbornly analogue Japanese government work a bit more like him.

Japan has some of the world’s best digital infrastructure, with top-notch mobile and broadband networks. Yet interacting with government agencies often involves slogging through labyrinthine offices and leafing through paperwork. In a survey of 30 countries in the OECD, a club mostly of rich countries, Japan ranked last in terms of providing digital services: only 7.3% of citizens requested anything from the government online in 2018, a fraction of Iceland’s 80%, and behind even countries considered relative technological backwaters, such as Slovakia and Mexico.

Suga Yoshihide, Japan’s prime minister since September, has vowed to “advance digitisation in government”. He is not the first to make such a promise: an e-government strategy announced in 2001 set the goal of putting all of Japan’s administrative procedures online by 2003. Yet as of 2019 just 7.5% of the nearly 56,000 processes handled by the national government can be completed online. Mr Suga, however, is putting more weight behind the drive to digitise than any of his predecessors. A new “...