I'm a chinese speaker, this new era name sounds kind of weird. When written in kanji, the previous nengos (meiji, taisho, showa, heisei) makes sense, and you can kind of tell the message it tries to convey. It just feels weird to me to concatenate "rei" and "wa" together.
Abe explains choice of Reiwa for next era name
41–50 of 87 posts
Re: Abe explains choice of Reiwa for next era name
#42Earlier quoted context omitted.
Rei, 令, in this case means 'good, fortunate', not command.
Huh, according to Jim Breen's dictionary ( http://nihongo.monash.edu/cgi-bin/wwwjdic ) 'good, fortunate' is '礼' (rei). '令' (rei) is listed as 'command, decree'. The official character that is being used is '令'. Is there some rule or convention that explains why 令 means 'good, fortunate' here? Is it due to the usage in the 7th century poetry that is referenced in the article?
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Re: Abe explains choice of Reiwa for next era name
#43Harmony is an important concept in East and West -- and it has a much more specific meaning than "goodness."
It played a major part in western philosophy (Pythagoras and Plato), where it was hypothesized that a mathematical harmony pervaded the cosmos. The first empirical -- even scientific -- hypothesis testing investigated this idea [0] using proportional lengths of string and the thickness of bronze chimes. Contemporaneously in China, both Confucianism and Daoism treated harmony as an underlying moral/aesthetic principle. The union of moral and aesthetic harmony was described in the thesis of Francis Hutchison, who was both Adam Smith's doctoral advisor and one of the biggest philosophical influences on the American founding fathers. See for yourself! [1]
Harmony is not sameness -- it is diversity in unity. This is a key insight in both Eastern and Western philosophy. In the West, the connection to the mathematics of the harmonic series doesn't appear to be coincidental (harmonies consisting of notes that share harmonics) -- although I'd challenge anyone to make sense of it all! My point here is that there is a story worth learning more about. I'd argue that we need guiding philosophical principles -- and it is awfully nice that there is a scientific one that underpins some of the largest societies on Earth:
* The official principal objective of the Chinese government is the creation of a "Harmonious Society".
* The official motto of the EU is "In varietate concordia"
* The traditional (although unofficial) motto of the USA is "e pluribus unum"
* The official motto of Indonesia is "Unity in Diversity"
* And now this from Japan!
Not to say that these governments are necessarily aware of this history, but only that these ideas are very old, very core and very unifying.
[0] Barker, A. (2007). The science of harmonics in classical Greece. Cambridge University Press. [1] Hutcheson, F., (1729). An inquiry into the original of our ideas of beauty and virtue: in two treatises. I. Concerning beauty, order, harmony, design. II. Concerning moral good and evil.
Re: Abe explains choice of Reiwa for next era name
#44I'm a chinese speaker, this new era name sounds kind of weird. When written in kanji, the previous nengos (meiji, taisho, showa, heisei) makes sense, and you can kind of tell the message it tries to convey. It just feels weird to me to concatenate "rei" and "wa" together.
This may be due to the fact that previous era names had its source in Chinese literature.
Reiwa, on the other hand, comes from passage that appears in Manyoshu poetry collection.
Re: Abe explains choice of Reiwa for next era name
#45This 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…
For what it’s worth, Japan is not unique in using different calendars in different contexts.
There are several calendars in India, all based on the moon. In my state within India everyone uses the Gregorian calendar for most things except in certain cases. For example, no marriages happen during the month of Margazhi (December 15th - January 15th).
There’s no conspiracy in using a different calendar. It’s just a continuation of a cultural practice that hurts no one.
Re: Abe explains choice of Reiwa for next era name
#46This is weird. I thought this was an April Fool's joke. 冷戦 means cold war, so 令和 would mean cold peace. Not that this has an actual meaning but if we assign one it's not very positive, i.e. things will appear unpeaceful and there will be wars, but actually this is peace, in the background. Not that this is the meaning they chose, but I find it just a bit curious.
Those two homonym “Rei” characters do not mean the same thing. Reiwa is a newly conjured “word” that means roughly “declaration/ordinance of peace” https://dictionary.goo.ne.jp/jn/233980/meaning/m0u/
Yeah, I'm stupid.
Re: Abe explains choice of Reiwa for next era name
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 l…
FWIW, the version where the lower part is like マ is also used in Japanese. Different calligraphic styles can have big visual differences.
Much like how the lowercase a or g can have multiple appearances in the latin alphabet.
Re: Abe explains choice of Reiwa for next era name
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
Huh, according to Jim Breen's dictionary ( http://nihongo.monash.edu/cgi-bin/wwwjdic ) 'good, fortunate' is '礼' (rei). '令' (rei) is listed as 'command, decree'. The official character that is being used is '令'. Is there some rule or convention that explains why 令 means 'good, fortunate' here? Is it due to the usage in the 7th century poetry that is referenced in the article?
In this particular case, '令月' means[1], a good month. https://kotobank.jp/word/%E4%BB%A4%E6%9C%88-660939 If we have to trace back even further, it can date back to the ancient Chinese classic, the Classic of Poetry, where it is being used as good/respectful: https://baike.baidu.com/item/%E4%BB%A4%E9%97%BB%E4%BB%A4%E6%...
The namers can publicly claim it to mean one thing while privately intending to be another, of course.
Re: Abe explains choice of Reiwa for next era name
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
Those two homonym “Rei” characters do not mean the same thing. Reiwa is a newly conjured “word” that means roughly “declaration/ordinance of peace” https://dictionary.goo.ne.jp/jn/233980/meaning/m0u/
Yeah, I'm stupid.
Not at all. Making mistakes is one of the best things when you learn a language. Kanjis can be complicated, but also fun. Cheers!
Re: Abe explains choice of Reiwa for next era name
#50This 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…
it is a self-imposed complexity that we could opt out if we were smart You could say that about a lot of things in a lot of countries. You have to think twice before you throw away such an old tradition that connects people to the past and the history of their culture. Most Japanese people I know are either ambivalent or happy about it. No one is suggesting doing away with it. You do know that plenty of other culture…
I'm Japanese, and while I don't exactly suggest doing away with it completely, I don't think it has a place in the vast majority of information processing going on in society today.
These Gengō updates force a massive, MASSIVE number of date entry forms (both paper and digital) -- from banks to government offices to driver's licenses to middle school soccer club application forms to just literally ANYTHING else imaginable -- to update to new versions including the new era name, resulting in so much wasted resources and taxpayer money every time it happens. Sure, standardizing all forms to the Gregorian calendar will also cause a mess, but at least that would only happen once. (A lot of those forms have already voluntarily switched to the Gregorian calendar, but a huge number still continue to use the Gengō notation, especially government-related forms.)
The Gengō era system even left us our own version of the Y2K problem: Back when legacy mainframe systems were being built, there were systems that recorded the year internally using the Showa era count (Showa 1 = 1926), and was kept that way even after the Showa era ended in 1989 and Heisei rolled around. Such systems will reach year Showa 100 on 2025, where unfixed systems could act weird much like with Y2K.
Also to note is that conservatives in power were very strongly opposed to publicizing the new era name ahead of its implementation (citing "tradition"), completely ignoring the reality of modern-day IT infrastructure requiring time to implement code updates and test their systems against all imaginable edge cases. As a compromise, they ended up giving one month advance notice (The new era goes in effect May 1), but this is way too little time.
So I'm fine with the Gengō counting system being used in casual conversation or formal imperial rituals and such, but those are about the only things I'm fine with.