
Abe explains choice of Reiwa for next era name - unsignedint
https://japantoday.com/category/national/japan-names-new-era-reiwa
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dr_dshiv
Harmony 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.

~~~
rangibaby
Don’t forget that the Chinese character for harmony also represents “Japan”

~~~
thaumasiotes
The Chinese character for harmony is 和. The Japanese character 和 does
represent Japan. The usual Chinese character that would represent Japan is 日;
和 is used in expressions taken from Japanese like 大和民族, the Japanese race.

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fenomas
Amusingly there's a pun here on "Zero-sum Era". This because "rei" is a common
way to read the numeral zero, and "zero-wa" (using the same "wa" from the new
era name) is the Japanese term for "zero-sum".

~~~
ekianjo
No, because nobody cares about the sound. The kanji matters. Soundwise there
are tons of kanji with the exact same pronounciation so there is no pun to be
found.

~~~
wodenokoto
You are right that there are many homonyms in Japanese, but you are wrong in
thinking that that results in nobody caring about them.

Japan has a proud tradition of phonetic based puns, called dajare. Wikipedia
has a surprisingly long list, which includes explanations:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dajare](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dajare)

~~~
Kurtz79
"ウランは売らん (uran wa uran) Translation: I never sell uranium. Explanation: ウラン
(uran) means uranium, and the second 売らん (uran) means "never sell"."

While in the West we have Uranus puns.

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Grue3
I think the biggest problem is that if you type "reiwa" in an IME, 令和 wouldn't
be shown as a suggestion because it wasn't a real word before. You'd have to
write each character separately.

Also speaking of Abe I saw a joke that you could see アベ in the era name if you
look closely.
[http://livedoor.blogimg.jp/animanmatome/imgs/5/f/5fa3bffe-s....](http://livedoor.blogimg.jp/animanmatome/imgs/5/f/5fa3bffe-s.jpg)

~~~
zhte415
Wouldn't the IME remember it for next time? And IME updates include it? So at
most type it explicitly as two characters once per IME/device?

~~~
Freak_NL
Yes, yes, and mostly yes.

This is no different from entering a name of someone written with a less
common combination of kanji. You can either enter the word phonetically and
pick the kanji you want (this trains the IME), or manually add an IME
dictionary entry.

I fully expect all IME's in common use to have updates for this within days,
if not already.

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SECProto
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](https://jisho.org/search/%E4%BB%A4%20%23kanji)

~~~
fraculus
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 list of "Examples of
language-dependent glyphs" in the Wikipedia article [1].

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Han_unification#Examples_of_...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Han_unification#Examples_of_language-
dependent_glyphs)

~~~
glandium
FWIW, the version where the lower part is like マ is also used in Japanese.
Different calligraphic styles can have big visual differences.

~~~
needle0
Much like how the lowercase a or g can have multiple appearances in the latin
alphabet.

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dang
Discussed yesterday:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19528287](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19528287)

I think we can treat the actual name as significant new information
([https://hn.algolia.com/?query=by:dang%20%22significant%20new...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=by:dang%20%22significant%20new%20information%22&sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comment&storyText=false&prefix=false&page=0)).

~~~
tenf-sefhu
Oh thanks

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danbolt
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.

~~~
triodan
It's a combination of two existing characters, the rei as in meirei/命令 (order,
command) and wa as in heiwa/平和 (peace, harmony). No new characters need to be
reserved.

~~~
tanilama
Rei, 令, in this case means 'good, fortunate', not command.

~~~
archgoon
Huh, according to Jim Breen's dictionary ([http://nihongo.monash.edu/cgi-
bin/wwwjdic](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?

~~~
comex
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.

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

[https://mobile.twitter.com/nick_kapur/status/111270395164693...](https://mobile.twitter.com/nick_kapur/status/1112703951646937088)

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ta1234512
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.

~~~
unsignedint
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.

~~~
glandium
It's not even a word in Manyōshū. It's two characters taken from two words in
a sentence from there, 令月 and 和ぎ.

~~~
rangibaby
Heisei and Showa are both made up of single characters selected from poetry
passages, I guess that is how they choose names

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ProxCoques
What'll you do when you get lonely, And nobody's waiting by your side? You've
been running and hiding much too long. You know it's just your foolish pride.

Reiwa, you've got me on my knees. Reiwa, I'm begging, darling please.

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quelltext
This 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.

~~~
hkmurakami
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/](https://dictionary.goo.ne.jp/jn/233980/meaning/m0u/)

~~~
quelltext
Yeah, I'm stupid.

~~~
comex
If it makes you feel better, here's a (presumably) Japanese person making the
same association:

[https://www.reddit.com/r/newsokur/comments/b7wf5k/令という漢字/eju...](https://www.reddit.com/r/newsokur/comments/b7wf5k/令という漢字/ejuni4o/)

Rough translation: "Somehow this kanji feels winter-like. I guess because of a
strong sense of '冷'."

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euske
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 system, as this will affect so many legacy
systems. Also it will please certain nationalistic right wingers here. But
nonetheless it is a self-imposed complexity that we could opt out if we were
smart.

~~~
Camillo
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 bigger impact on Americanizing Japan
than retiring era names ever could, isn't it?

~~~
mikekchar
The article refers to Abe's government as "ultra-conservative", not as "right-
wing nationalist". I would not say that Abe is nationalist in the normal
definition of the word. Japanese politics tends towards right wing, though it
tends to be more of an old school conservatism: old money, but with a sense of
responsibility towards the people. So, for example, there aren't a lot of
services performed by the government and it is expected that businesses
somehow voluntarily pay to have these things done. In my rural town the
government does not mow the sides road, or trim branches on trees, or maintain
the parks. That's pretty much all done on a volunteer basis by local
businesses, or residents. There is a big rota and you have to go out once a
month and do some work.

Financially, things are conservative as well. Abenomics is literally
Reganomics with "Regan" replaced by "Abe" \-- trickle down theory and all. And
it works just as well as Reganomics didn't too ;-) Abe has also been quite
busy trying to rewrite the constitution so that Japan can get into
international conflicts where their allies are involved. Previously Japan was
only allowed to get into conflicts where Japan itself was under threat. There
is some speculation that the emperor only abdicated in order to force the
government to do a bunch of constitutional work and delay the constitutional
work that Abe had ordered. Abe managed to survive a general election, so if
that was the goal it ended up being fruitless.

In terms of nationalism, I don't think that Japan (or its government) fits the
definition. There are protectionist attitudes towards food trade, but that is
understandable given that more than 1 million people starved after WWII due to
the fact that Japan had imported most of its staple foods at the time and got
blockaded. There are actual laws that date from the end of WWII that enforce
this protectionism, so it's hard to blame the current government :-)

There are, of course, nationalist people in Japan (and even nationalist
political parties), but they do not represent Japanese mainstream thinking in
any way shape or form. It is very much the loony fringe.

