The Showa Hundred Year Problem
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The Showa Hundred Year Problem
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Re: The Showa Hundred Year Problem
#2Japan's continued use of the imperial year system is similar to America's use of imperial units instead of the metric system.
Don't count on either changing soon.
Re: The Showa Hundred Year Problem
#3> This also means that, when an era changes, the Gregorian year will have two imperial year designations, for example 1989 is both Showa 64 and Heisei 1, depending whether the day of the year is before or after the imperial transition.
This isn't unusual. For example, the American calendar year 2024 belongs to both the school year "2023-2024" and the school year "2024-2025".
The general phenomenon here is "sometimes things begin when it isn't calendar New Year's Day", which is universal to all cultures.
Re: The Showa Hundred Year Problem
#4> While a number of articles cropped up explaining what the Showa Hundred Year Problem was leading up to 2025, they passed mostly unnoticed, mere curiosities compared to the major media attention showered on Y2K a quarter century ago. And, in fact, as 2025 comes to a close, I can't find any reports of actual issues stemming from the date change.
This is probably a combination of two things:
- computer people hate with a passion the Imperial calendar. Normal people are already annoyed when they have to do some calculation, in a decade+ spent here I never ever heard of anyone actively wanting to display or handle dates in the imperial/religious system. The only people I ever saw do it were required to.
- people who care the most about the imperial calendar use mostly paper and static data. It will be for printed forms, official announcements etc. The dynamic part will be mostly for this year or next year, and those will be up to date with the current/next area (also the sanest way to handle that is to have a unix date internally and only convert at display/parsing)
Re: The Showa Hundred Year Problem
#5I'm having a hard time imagining someone still using the Showa calendar as I read this in the 73rd month of 2020.
Re: The Showa Hundred Year Problem
#6> While a number of articles cropped up explaining what the Showa Hundred Year Problem was leading up to 2025, they passed mostly unnoticed, mere curiosities compared to the major media attention showered on Y2K a quarter century ago. And, in fact, as 2025 comes to a close, I can't find any reports of actual issues stemming from the date change. This is probably a combination of two things: - computer people hate wit…
While most developers may dislike the imperial calendar, all of my bank/brokerage statements display dates using it, as do tax/pension forms. It's definitely still in heavy use for some very important data.
On a similar note, I recently requested a list of historical transactions from a brokerage and found that transaction dates continued to be annotated as Heisei all the way through Heisei 36 (2024), a full 5 years after Heisei officially ended in Heisei 31 / Reiwa 1 (2019). Late in 2024, transactions finally started being annotated Reiwa 6.
Re: The Showa Hundred Year Problem
#7> While a number of articles cropped up explaining what the Showa Hundred Year Problem was leading up to 2025, they passed mostly unnoticed, mere curiosities compared to the major media attention showered on Y2K a quarter century ago. And, in fact, as 2025 comes to a close, I can't find any reports of actual issues stemming from the date change. This is probably a combination of two things: - computer people hate wit…
While most developers may dislike the imperial calendar, all of my bank/brokerage statements display dates using it, as do tax/pension forms. It's definitely still in heavy use for some very important data. On a similar note, I recently requested a list of historical transactions from a brokerage and found that transaction dates continued to be annotated as Heisei all the way through Heisei 36 (2024), a full 5 years…
> my bank/brokerage statements display dates using it, as do tax/pension forms. It's definitely still in heavy use for some very important data.
I have a hunch the internal system doesn't store it in imperial calendar. While those can be very old system, they went through waves of modernization and in particular handling future payment was always a PITA as you couldn't predict what year it would be 5 or 10 years ahead, or even next year really.
Storing a Unix time and doing the conversion at display time is the sanest way to handle it.
Funny thing is,even with that kind of system the conversion tables can still be outdated, and will cause issue like the ones you had with lenient numbering.
Re: The Showa Hundred Year Problem
#8A lot of earlier digital timepieces come with arbitrary date range limits and I have always wondered what is the reason behind such limitations.
For example, a lot of camera date backs (used to physically embed time and date on film) could not be set to any date post a certain year, most commonly 2020 but I’ve also seen 2019 and 2029 as cutoffs. Even models that has a 4 digit year format isn’t immune from this issue, and sometimes it’s possible to bypass it by setting the date to Dec 31 2020, let the it roll over naturally to Jan 1 2021 and you will then be free to fast forward the date.
Maybe it’s similar to the YEAR 10000 bug on modern Windows OS where many internal variables could overflow beyond a certain datum so it would make sense to prevent it in the front end.
Re: The Showa Hundred Year Problem
#9> This also means that, when an era changes, the Gregorian year will have two imperial year designations, for example 1989 is both Showa 64 and Heisei 1, depending whether the day of the year is before or after the imperial transition. This isn't unusual. For example, the American calendar year 2024 belongs to both the school year "2023-2024" and the school year "2024-2025". The general phenomenon here is "sometimes…
In ancient China, the imperial year designations were usually changed in the second year following the coronation of a new emperor, thus preventing the occurrence of two imperial year designations in the same year. Japan seems to have chosen to change the imperial year designation in the same year because of the faster flow of information in modern times. I still think it would be more convenient to change it the second year.
Re: The Showa Hundred Year Problem
#10> Centuries in the Gregorian calendar start from 00 with their last two digits - 1800, 1900, and 2000.
Umm, wait, what? No, Gregorian centuries most definitely start at year xx01! The first century was from year 1 to 100, the second from 101 to 200, and so on. There was no year zero in the Gregorian calendar.