Excited, Japan enters era of Reiwa

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April 2, 2019

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Excited, Japan enters era of Reiwa

Source: AFP | 00:00 UTC+8 April 2, 2019 |

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At the Tokyo offices of a major calendar maker, executives and employees clustered around a television broke into applause as the country’s next imperial era name was announced: Reiwa.

While the Gregorian calendar is in common use in Japan, the country’s imperial era system is also widely used and the announcement has been closely watched.

The country’s current era, Heisei, will end in a month with Emperor Akihito’s historic abdication.

For Kunio Kowaguchi, president of the Todan calendar and diary manufacturer, the announcement was more than just symbolic.

It kick-starts a frantic period churning out new products bearing the “Reiwa” name.

About 30 members of the company gathered around a television at the firm’s Tokyo offices when Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga held up the traditional calligraphy revealing the new name.

“I like it, it’s very good,” Kowaguchi said, pointing out not many Japanese words begin with an “r” sound.

“Reiwa sounds modern but when you see the characters, it’s solemn.”

The government has not yet issued the official translation of the name’s meaning.

But it combines the characters rei which can have meanings related to “order” but also “auspicious,” and wa meaning “peace” or “harmony.”

As soon as the two-character name was announced, a Todan designer rushed to her computer to start preparing new layouts for products bearing gengo or imperial era dates.

Another employee started consulting digital dictionaries to determine the order in which the strokes of the two characters should be written.

That information was then passed on to a calligrapher to write the characters. The wet ink was hurriedly dried first with a traditional fan and then with a hair dryer to allow the characters to be scanned as quickly as possible.

The new era name has arrived too late for Todan’s rollout of 2019 calendars but the company will now start working on 2020 products, as well as a special production of 800 desktop calendars that will run from May 2019 to March 2020.

For the year 2020, “we are talking about production plans for 50 kinds of calendars with gengo,” Kowaguchi said.

“Plus the special edition for the first year of the new era.”

Japan is the only country still using Chinese-style imperial calendars and many people still remember historic events by the era year they occurred.

So it wasn’t just calendar makers firing up the presses yesterday, with Japan’s newspapers quickly issuing special editions that prompted stampedes in parts of central Tokyo.

At Todan’s factory, 70 workers had their own excited gathering at the firm’s canteen to watch the announcement.

“We have all been working together in the past two years and I was filled with a sense of relief when I heard the name announced,” said factory chief Junichi Ishii.

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Excited, Japan enters era of Reiwa

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