Reiwa

is the current era of Japan's official calendar. It began on 1 May 2019, the day on which Emperor Akihito's elder son, Naruhito, ascended the throne as the 126th Emperor of Japan. The day before, Emperor Akihito abdicated the Chrysanthemum Throne, marking the end of the Heisei era. The year 2019 corresponds with Heisei 31 from 1 January through 30 April, and with from 1 May. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Japan explained the meaning of ''Reiwa'' to be "beautiful harmony".

Background

Announcement

The Japanese government on 1 April 2019 announced the name during a live televised press conference, as Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga traditionally revealed the kanji calligraphy on a board. The Prime Minister Shinzō Abe said that ''Reiwa'' represents "a culture being born and nurtured by people coming together beautifully".

Name selection

A shortlist of names for the new era was drawn up by a nine-member expert panel comprising seven men and two women with the cabinet selecting the final name from the shortlist. The nine experts were:

* – professor at Chiba University of Commerce
* – former chief justice of the Supreme Court of Japan
* – Nobel prize-winning stem-cell scientist, professor at Kyoto University
* – screenwriter and novelist
* – former chairman of the Japan Business Federation
* – trustee and president of Waseda University
* – president of the Japan Newspaper Publishers and Editors Association
* – president of the Japan Broadcasting Corporation
* – president of Nippon Television Holdings

The day after the announcement, the government revealed that the other candidate names under consideration had been , , , , and , three of which were sourced from two Japanese works, the ''Kojiki'' and the '' Nihon Shoki''. Official pronunciations and meanings of these names were not released, although the reading of Eikō was leaked; the other readings are speculative. Predicted guess names included and .

Origin and meaning

The kanji characters for ''Reiwa'' are derived from the ''Man'yōshū'', an eighth-century (Nara period) anthology of '' waka'' poetry. The ''kotobagaki'' (headnote) attached to a group of 32 poems (815–846) in Volume 5 of the collection, composed on the occasion of a poetic gathering to view the plum blossoms, reads as follows:

The Japanese Foreign Ministry provided an English-language interpretation of ''Reiwa'' as "beautiful harmony", to dispel reports that here is translated as "command" or "order" – which are the significantly more common meanings of the character, especially so in both modern Japanese and Chinese. The Foreign Ministry also noted that "beautiful harmony" is rather an explanation than an official translation or a legally binding interpretation.

Prior to and naturally irrespective of the era announcement, within the context of the Chinese essay in the ''Man'yōshū'' from which the excerpt is cited, the expression (which characters constitute the word ''reigetsu'' in modern Japanese) has generally been academically translated or interpreted as "wonderful" or "good (Japanese: ''yoi'') month" in published scholarly works, such as by Alexander Vovin in English as ''wonderful month'' in his 2011 commentary and translation of Book 5, or by Susumu Nakanishi in Japanese as in his commentary and translation into modern Japanese that was published in 1978. In addition, following the announcement of ''Reiwa'' in 2019, Susumu Nakanishi advocated for understanding the character of the era name through the help of the Japanese word , stressing that in the traditional dictionaries (such as '' Erya'' or the '' Kangxi Dictionary''), the word is explained with the word . Nakanishi criticized the understanding of the
in ''Reiwa'' as Japanese , which was propagated by then-Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, pointing out that neither the etymology nor the exact sense are appropriate.

Novelty

"Reiwa" marks the first Japanese era name with characters that were taken from Japanese literature instead of classic Chinese literature.

Robert Campbell, director-general of National Institute of Japanese Literature in Tokyo, provided an official televised interpretation to NHK, regarding the characters based on the poem, noting that "Rei" is an auspicious wave of energy of the plum blossoms carried by the wind, and "Wa", the general character of peace and tranquility.

Accordingly, the name marks the 248th era name designated in Japanese history. While the "wa" character has been used in 19 previous era names, the "rei" character has never appeared before. The character appeared in a proposed era name in 1864—''Reitoku'' ()—that the ruling Tokugawa shogunate rejected, as it could be interpreted as the emperor commanding (''rei'') the ''Toku''gawa.

On the other hand, according to , professor of Japanese literature, and , professor of Chinese philosophy, interviewed by the ''Asahi Shimbun'' shortly after the announcement was made, the phrase has an earlier source in ancient Chinese literature dating back to the second century AD, on which the ''Man'yōshū'' usage is allegedly based:

Implementation

Currency

According to the Japan Mint, all coins with the new era name will be released by October 2019. It takes three months to make preparations such as creating molds in order to input text or pictures. The Mint will prioritize creating 100- and 500- yen coins due to their high mintage and circulation, with an anticipated release by the end of July 2019.

Technology

Anticipating the coming of the new era, the Unicode Consortium reserved a code point () in September 2018 for a new glyph which will combine half-width versions of ''Reiwa'' kanji, and , into a single character; similar code points exist for earlier era names, including Shōwa () and Heisei () periods. The resulting new version of Unicode, 12.1.0, was released on 7 May 2019.

The Microsoft Windows update KB4469068 included support for the new era.

Events

On 19 November 2019, Shinzo Abe became the longest-serving prime minister of Japan and surpassed the previous 2,883-day record of Katsura Tarō. Abe also beat Eisaku Satō's 2,798 consecutive days record on 23 August 2020. He resigned for health reasons in September 2020 and was succeeded by Yoshihide Suga.

In early 2020, Japan began to suffer from the COVID-19 pandemic as several countries reported a significant increase in cases by March 2020. Japan and other countries donated masks, medical equipment, and money to China.

In June 2020, Fugaku was declared the most powerful supercomputer in the world with a performance of 415.53 PFLOPS. Fugaku also ranked first place in computational methods performance for industrial use, artificial intelligence applications, and big data analytics. It was co-developed by the RIKEN research institute and Fujitsu.

Despite COVID, the Tokyo Olympics went ahead in the summer of 2021, a year later than originally scheduled.

In September 2021, Suga announced he would not stand in the Liberal Democratic Party leadership election, effectively ending his term as prime minister. He was succeeded by Fumio Kishida who took office as prime minister on 4 October 2021. Kishida was elected leader of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) a week prior. He was officially confirmed as the country's 100th prime minister following a parliamentary vote.

In March 2022, a strong offshore earthquake near Fukushima killed 4, injured hundreds, and damaged the Shinkansen line in Tohoku.

In July 2022, the former prime minister Shinzo Abe was assassinated by Tetsuya Yamagami in Nara. By comparison, Japan had only 10 gun related deaths from 2017 to 2021 and 1 gun fatality in 2021.

Conversion table

To convert any Gregorian calendar year since 2019 to Japanese calendar year in Reiwa era, you simply subtract 2018 from the year in question.

See also

* 2019 in Japan
*2020 in Japan
*2021 in Japan
*2022 in Japan

References

Externals links

Reiwa

Reiwa flag

{{Japanese era names, selected=from 1264

2019 establishments in Japan

Japanese eras
2010s neologisms
2019 neologisms
2019 in Japan
2020s in Japan
2019 introductions