4 ms·

Disclaimer: I am a Japanese national who was born and raised in this country. For god sake, I really hope fellow Japanese people stop using this inefficient an

• kazinator 8y ago
  It's just "subtract 1988".
  • mamon 8y ago
    Which makes it very easy for all people who were born in 1988, but inconvenient for everyone else :)
    • sombremesa 8y ago
      Makes it easier for people born in 1987.
  • csa 8y ago
    Or just add 12 to the last two digits of the current year. Not complicated for current dates. Not so helpful for non-Hesei dates.
• kevin_thibedeau 8y ago
  Even worse is time keeping based on the combination of Chinese and Japanese zodiacal years which repeat in a 60 year sequence in conjunction with the imperial era. Showa ended up too long so there were duplicates.
• innocenat 8y ago
  What is "this country?"
  • bschwindHN 8y ago
    In a thread about Japan, with a reply from a Japanese national talking only about Japan. Hmm, I wonder which country it could possibly be.
• sonnyblarney 8y ago
  Almost everything in life boils down to some kind of social convention which is essentially 'tradition'. I don't know if you have kids, but as soon as they start to ask questions, it becomes clear. Like why you can't just wear your thong to work? Or nothing at all? Pull at the thread and it comes apart pretty quick. Answers lie more often lie in identity and culture, then they do some kind hard logic. Obviously Monarchies represent a distinct issue as there's the essential problem of class, but I'd also argue there's something much more than intangible there: so many of the most successful countries have monarchies. Popular ones to boot. Even countries which had powerful socialist leaders (and of course socialism/communism would be utterly opposed to monarchy in theory because that's literally the top of the class system they want to destroy). Sweden, for example is a very socialist country with a monarchy that's more popular than the UK monarchy in the UK. Of course, you can dump all of that and just use Western time, and mark your birthday in 'days since Jesus was born' ... but I'm not sure how relevant that would be in bucking tradition :) I also think there is value in the Japanese 'era' system in some ways. While we see it through the lens of 'Monarchy', maybe we consider just seeing it as 'era' which uses the Monarchy a specific demarcation point. After all, a new 'era' would have represented entirely new forms of governance, structure, international/feudal relationships. An opportunity to do things like debt forgiveness, heck even build some public works like big libraries or museums, such as happens for each US President. In many ways, it makes (or perhaps did) make more sense to mark 'eras' in relation to the geopolitical context as it would have in hard dates. In the grand scheme of history we use the Geological Time Scale [1] (i.e. eras, epochs) as it's quite a bit more convenient that just citing dates. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geologic_time_scale https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geologic_time_scale
  • warabe 8y ago
    Thank you so much for your thoughtful reply. I understand your idea. > It boils down to “tradition” Yeah, I think you are 100% correct, but I don’t think everything can be justified for that reason. For some countries, say, Sodomy Law is still tradition. In the U.S., people still use weird unit system, refusing adopting Metric system. I know they are extreme examples. Celebrating new era is wonderful, but I hope people reconsider the use of this peculiar year counting system. It is a good time, I guess. Everything boils down to “tradition”, like you said, but I don’t think we have to stick to the same tradition.
• chrischen 8y ago
  The Emperor is used as a nationalist symbol to tie the people together (to promote us vs them).