
Japan is scrambling to reconcile systems with imperial calendar - ChrisArchitect
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/23/business/japan-reiwa-calendar.html
======
danso
Related thread from 10 months ago, about a MSDN article titled "The Japanese
Calendar’s Y2K Moment"

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17430085](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17430085)

From the MSDN article:

> _The Japanese Calendar has Japanese Era Names that coincide with the reign
> of the Emperor. For most of the modern age of computing that has been the
> Heisei era, however the Emperor is expected to step down on April 30, 2019.
> Which will bring about the beginning of a new era. Fortunately, this is a
> rare event, however it means that most software has not been tested to
> ensure that it will behave with an additional era._

> _The magnitude of this event on computing systems using the Japanese
> Calendar may be similar to the Y2K event with the Gregorian Calendar. For
> the Y2K event, there was world-wide recognition of the upcoming change,
> resulting in governments and software vendors beginning to work on solutions
> for that problem several years before 1 Jan 2000. Even with that preparation
> many organizations encountered problems due to the millennial transition._

I swear there was an HN thread about a language-specific implementation (Java?
Ruby?) of calendar, which included having to deal with the Japanese epoch
change.

~~~
PeterisP
A big issue is that people couldn't finalize any changes until the new era
name had been decided and announced, which happened just a few weeks ago on
April 1.

For things like Y2K, you could have done your deployment and testing long
before it happened - for this change, everyone has just this one month to wait
for any vendors involved to finalize, test and distribute their updates so
that they can start deploying them on their own systems. _No_ programming
language or calendar library version older than March 31, 2019 could include
proper support for Japanese dates of May.

~~~
danso
> _A big issue is that people couldn 't finalize any changes until the new era
> name had been decided and announced, which happened just a few weeks ago on
> April 1._

Yeah, I was wondering about this line in the article:

> _Officials compounded the problem by keeping the new era’s name secret until
> April 1, just one month before the transition._

Is there any reason, specific to Japanese tradition/convention/bureaucracy to
keep the name of the era secret until _one month_ before the actual change?
When is the era name actually decided on, and how soon after the abdication of
the current emperor?

~~~
kryptiskt
The era name was decided by the government a couple of weeks before the
announcement. Announcing a month in advance was a concession, conservative
politicians wanted it like it always has been done, that the name is revealed
at the start of the era.

~~~
SiVal
I had to deal with the previous transition, and that one was going to be the
result of the death of the emperor. Therefore, software was not _allowed_ to
include any provision for transition to a new date system, because doing so
would imply that the emperor might die someday, which was strictly forbidden.
I don't know whether it was an actual law, but there was zero tolerance for
including any provision for changing the Showa date system.

As a foreign (non-Japanese) company, we just used the western-style date
almost everywhere except for published documents to skirt this problem. Doing
the wrong Japanese thing would have earned us serious hostility from the
Japanese business press, but foreigners doing dates the foreign way would
tolerated as mere foreignness.

------
gpvos
There will also be a new Unicode character:
[http://blog.unicode.org/2018/09/new-japanese-
era.html](http://blog.unicode.org/2018/09/new-japanese-era.html)

~~~
ChrisArchitect
interesting - extraordinary measures needed where possible to plan ahead to
help with the crazy rush imposed because they don't release name until April
1st. Reserving an empty space for the new chars and then a quick patch right
after the announcement

------
localhostdotdev
the issue is that the name of the new era was unknown until ~2 weeks ago as
far as I can tell

[https://bugs.ruby-lang.org/issues/15195](https://bugs.ruby-
lang.org/issues/15195)

[https://bugs.ruby-lang.org/issues/15742](https://bugs.ruby-
lang.org/issues/15742)

