Records Management as the Basis of Open Information

With the complication, intensification and specialization of administration, the information drawn up and acquired by administrative organs for the performance of their duties is steadily increasing and has reached immense proportions, and the continued diversification and increase of administrative information is inevitable in the future. In administrative affairs in our country, systematization by means of computerization of activities based around large‐scale, repetitive work is fairly advanced, but fundamentally, that work is still carried out with paper documents at its heart. It is an old survey, but in 1976, the quantity of documents held by internal subdivisions of all provincial governments was such that, converted to B5 size and piled up, the documents would reach 380,000 metres, which is equivalent to 100 times the height of Mt Fuji. Each employee would have as much as about 10 metres of documents.