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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

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.

Tsubasachan 8y ago
Don't feel bad. Japan at least was smart enough to choose the metric system.
thaumasiotes 8y ago
> 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. The early Babylonian system was to give each year its own name. This has really helped us, thousands of years later, to develop an accurate chronology of the period. If Japan used that system today, do you think the per-switch cost of switching would be higher or lower? How about the per-emperor cost?

Tsubasachan 8y ago

Don't feel bad. Japan at least was smart enough to choose the metric system.

thaumasiotes 8y ago

> 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. The early Babylonian system was to give each year its own name. This has really helped us, thousands of years later, to develop an accurate chronology of the period. If Japan used that system today, do you think the per-switch cost of switching would be higher or lower? How about the per-emperor cost?