@psion@... As per the media:
Wax cylinders from that era do exist and are still workable, as long as they were stored with some semblance of care. I personally have ancient-but-working 78 RPM records that were first "pressed" in 1918 (this is pre-vinyl, remember; these records were made of shellac, a crude bakelite-substance, and a paper-cotton board core). In spite of being 92 years old, they still have passable (no, not perfect, "passable") fidelity.
As an analogue, the SD cards quite likely have error correction, duplicate pages (or even a 'parity stripe' of sorts), and materials that, if kept with reasonable care, can probably last 100+ years.
The trick, as you've mentioned, is in the equipment. OTOH, it wouldn't take much to snap up a usable number of spare laptops with SSD drives and store them in areas throughout, say, the region (or in Japan's case, set a dozen or two aside in every prefecture), for the express purpose of reading those cards at some future date - and nothing else.
Policy helps too - set a time (say, every 10-20 years) where the SD cards must be read by some automated double-blind process and copied off to another, newer write-once long-term media.
I suspect that, especially in the case of police evidence, there's (eventually) going to be a date where you can simply chuck a given SD card into a vault somewhere, and either forget it exists, or let the historians deal with it. Maybe chuck in a specially-built computer, and if you're uber-anal, maybe a generator (or solar panel kit, wind turbine, etc) to power the thing can be thrown into the same vault as well.
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