Discussed yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19528287
I think we can treat the actual name as significant new information (https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...).
Abe explains choice of Reiwa for next era name
11–20 of 87 posts
Re: Abe explains choice of Reiwa for next era name
#12Anyone else gets display issues with 令? It shows up incorrectly in certain android locations (keyboard, hangouts) but looks fine in firefox. The stroke order illustration on jisho also has the last stroke wrong [1] [1] https://jisho.org/search/%E4%BB%A4%20%23kanji
Not wrong. Just a difference in how fonts display them. Like how ‘a’ sometimes has a little hook above it and sometimes doesn’t.
Re: Abe explains choice of Reiwa for next era name
#13Anyone else gets display issues with 令? It shows up incorrectly in certain android locations (keyboard, hangouts) but looks fine in firefox. The stroke order illustration on jisho also has the last stroke wrong [1] [1] https://jisho.org/search/%E4%BB%A4%20%23kanji
This is basically just a font difference. The angular version (in the text of your link) is the more typewritten style, while the version in the stroke order graph is the more handwritten style.
It's roughly analogous to the way "g" would usually descend on the right when written by hand, but descends on the left in most typefaces.
Re: Abe explains choice of Reiwa for next era name
#14This is stupid. Make no mistake: this is not the Japanese "culture". Most private organizations in Japan have already switched to the Western calendar, and its only user is the Japanese government (although it's one of the biggest ones, sadly). They should stop wasting their time and energy for this farce.
And yes, one could argue that this will create extra IT jobs that would be unnecessary if they abandoned the system, as this will affect so many legacy systems. Also it will please certain nationalistic right wingers here. But nonetheless it is a self-imposed complexity that we could opt out if we were smart.
Re: Abe explains choice of Reiwa for next era name
#15Are there any developers with Unicode experience able to comment on this? I know the character for Reiwa has been reserved but I’m unsure if programmers are familiar with Y2K-esque bugs that could happen.
$ echo "令和" | hexdump -C 00000000 e4 bb a4 e5 92 8c 0a |.......| 00000007 Obviously the individual kanjis are reserved in CJK plane. But how is it related to Y2K-esque bugs?
A special character of the two kanji are combined into one for official document use. This has been reserved at U+32FF.
Re: Abe explains choice of Reiwa for next era name
#16Amusingly there's a pun here on "Zero-sum Era". This because "rei" is a common way to read the numeral zero, and "zero-wa" (using the same "wa" from the new era name) is the Japanese term for "zero-sum".
Re: Abe explains choice of Reiwa for next era name
#17Earlier quoted context omitted.
$ echo "令和" | hexdump -C 00000000 e4 bb a4 e5 92 8c 0a |.......| 00000007 Obviously the individual kanjis are reserved in CJK plane. But how is it related to Y2K-esque bugs?
Because this stuff is hardcoded into the standard library (at least in Java I know it is) and I assume it's the same for other things. For example any dates in the future like 2020 will show up wrong. Where it ought to be reiwa 2 it will be Heisei 31 which doesn't even exist. Heaven forbid you were doing something crazy like matching on strings for the date etc you could get into a world of hurt. Mostly though you al…
Heisei 31 is this year. Heisei 32 and above are the ones that don't exist.
Re: Abe explains choice of Reiwa for next era name
#18Earlier quoted context omitted.
Because this stuff is hardcoded into the standard library (at least in Java I know it is) and I assume it's the same for other things. For example any dates in the future like 2020 will show up wrong. Where it ought to be reiwa 2 it will be Heisei 31 which doesn't even exist. Heaven forbid you were doing something crazy like matching on strings for the date etc you could get into a world of hurt. Mostly though you al…
Heisei 31 is this year. Heisei 32 and above are the ones that don't exist.
Thankfully I don't live in Japan and have to deal with that system on a daily basis.
Re: Abe explains choice of Reiwa for next era name
#19Anyone else gets display issues with 令? It shows up incorrectly in certain android locations (keyboard, hangouts) but looks fine in firefox. The stroke order illustration on jisho also has the last stroke wrong [1] [1] https://jisho.org/search/%E4%BB%A4%20%23kanji
This might be a problem arising because of Han unification.
In Japanese, the character is commonly written with a vertical final stroke (at least in print), whereas in Chinese it's a diagonally down and to the right. However, they are encoded as the same in Unicode. What gets displayed depends on the font choice, possibly aided by somewhat hacky language hints.
This particular character is the second example in the list of "Examples of language-dependent glyphs" in the Wikipedia article [1].
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Han_unification#Examples_of_...
Re: Abe explains choice of Reiwa for next era name
#20This is stupid. Make no mistake: this is not the Japanese "culture". Most private organizations in Japan have already switched to the Western calendar, and its only user is the Japanese government (although it's one of the biggest ones, sadly). They should stop wasting their time and energy for this farce. And yes, one could argue that this will create extra IT jobs that would be unnecessary if they abandoned the sys…
Is it really such a big deal? It's not like they're _introducing_ regnal eras, it's just a new era name for the system they were already using.
BTW, both this comment and the article hint at a connection with right-wing nationalism. I won't claim to understand Japanese politics, but AFAIK Abe's government is increasing immigration to Japan to far higher levels than ever before. Surely that's going to have a far bigger impact on Americanizing Japan than retiring era names ever could, isn't it?