For a country that has traditionally been attached to paper bureaucracy, Japan is finding Covid-19 is highlighting the importance of digitization to radically transform and modernize public services, from education to health, in order to adapt to the changed circumstances the pandemic has wrought.
Despite a global reputation for impressive technological progress, Japan’s public sector – and a good portion of its private sector – has been slow to embrace the digital era, even as the country’s citizens become keenly aware of the need for the rollout of extensive digital policies.