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Abe explains choice of Reiwa for next era name

japantoday.com

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Re: Abe explains choice of Reiwa for next era name

#81

Post by SECProto »

Freak_NL wrote: post #67
chasontherobot wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Jisho does not have the last stroke wrong, that is how you write the kanji. The way it is represented in computer fonts is different than how it is hand written. The jisho instructions show how to hand write it.

The confusion probably stems from the way it is written in the calligraphic representation of 令和 presented by the government, which does do the same vertical stroke as in print. In normal handwriting マ is totally fine and common.

Yep, exactly! Certainly no expert on Japanese, just the only place I saw it written with the マ shape was my android device and jisho, so I assumed it was an error. Learned a new kanji today anyway!

Re: Abe explains choice of Reiwa for next era name

#82

Post by Smithalicious »

glandium wrote: post #64
Larrikin wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's been thirty years since anyone has to touch that code.

Some systems are even still on the previous era (shōwa). Some may even hit a Y2K-like problem in 2025 (shōwa 100).

I'm now imagining some kind of action movie where the emperor lives too long and a band of programmers have to assassinate them lest their code breaks.

Re: Abe explains choice of Reiwa for next era name

#83

Post by archgoon »

comex wrote: post #56
archgoon wrote: post #36

Earlier 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?

Even though there's an explanation, I've seen a bunch of negative reaction to the name from Japanese people online because of the association with "command", also linking it to the current prime minister and his relatively militaristic politics.

Interesting; came across this Twitter thread with a fairly detailed analysis.

https://mobile.twitter.com/nick_kapur/status/111270395164693...

Re: Abe explains choice of Reiwa for next era name

#84

Post by dionian »

SECProto wrote: post #10

Anyone 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

They are different variations of the same character. This is not very common but does occur. So it is a font issue.

Re: Abe explains choice of Reiwa for next era name

#85

Post by thaumasiotes »

Nullabillity wrote: post #80
thaumasiotes wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bugs of that type should have been worked out long ago; it is not the norm for the era change to coincide with the new year.

It is not the norm to reset your date system every 30 or so years.

...yes it is?

Re: Abe explains choice of Reiwa for next era name

#86

Post by needle0 »

danbolt wrote: post #2

Are 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.

Aside from the new combined glyph, One potentially major issue is that the character 令 exists in two locations in Unicode: U+4EE4 and U+F9A8. The latter is a compatibility variant, and depending on the how smart the text processing code used is, it may or may not be considered equal to the former.

Hence, that's now one more thing to test and work around for the poor engineers working karoshi hours, only given one month to implement changes on and test the ungodly numbers of computer systems all around the country.

Really, this one-month compromise between conservatives and engineers was pretty much the worst possible result: too short to work with any breathing room, too long to throw up hands and abandon the idea of implementing it in time.

Re: Abe explains choice of Reiwa for next era name

#87

Post by euske »

Camillo wrote: post #20
euske wrote: post #14

This 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 bigge…

> Is it really such a big deal?

It is! Nagoya city allocated 480 million JPY (4.3m USD) of budget for modifying their system [1]. Kobe city estimates 550 million JPY (5m USD) [2]. There are about 800 cities and 800 townships in Japan, each of them will need to pay a similar amount of cost, because every date in their system is in the era calendar. The total cost is going to be enormous. Yet, as of 2019, if you ask most laypeople they don't even know what era year is the current year. It is only used within government or municipal offices.

[1] https://hicbc.com/news/detail.asp?id=00049F45 [2] https://www.kobe-np.co.jp/news/sougou/201904/0012202757.shtm...

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