A shortlist of names for the new era was drawn up by a nine-member expert panel comprising seven men and two women with the cabinet selecting the final name from the shortlist. The nine experts were:
The day after the announcement, the government revealed that the other candidate names under consideration had been, Kyūka,,, and Banpo or Banhō, three of which were sourced from two Japanese works, the Kojiki and the Nihon Shoki. Official pronunciations and meanings of these names were not released, although the reading of Eikō was leaked; the other readings are speculative. Predicted guess names included An'ei and Heiwa.
Origin and meaning
The kanji characters for Reiwa are derived from the Man'yōshū, an eighth-century anthology of waka poetry. The kotobagaki attached to a group of 32 poems in Volume 5 of the collection, composed on the occasion of a poetic gathering to view the plum blossoms, reads as follows: The Japanese Foreign Ministry provided an English-language interpretation of Reiwa as "beautiful harmony", to dispel reports that "Rei" here is translated as "command" or "order" – which aside from "auspicious" are the more common meanings of the character in modern Japanese and Chinese. The Foreign Ministry also noted that "beautiful harmony" is rather an explanation than an official translation or a legally binding interpretation.
Novelty
"Reiwa" marks the first Japanese era name with characters that were taken from Japanese classical literature instead of classic Chinese literature. The Chinese foreign ministry responded to a question from the Japanese media on this by saying that it is an internal matter for Japan to choose an era name, and expressing good wishes for Sino-Japanese relations. According to Masaaki Tatsumi, professor of Japanese literature, and Masaharu Mizukami, professor of Chinese philosophy, interviewed by the Asahi Shimbun shortly after the announcement was made, the phrase has an earlier source in ancient Chinese literature dating back to the second century AD, on which the Man'yōshū usage is allegedly based: Robert Campbell, director-general of National Institute of Japanese Literature in Tokyo, provided an official televised interpretation to NHK, regarding the characters based on the poem, noting that "Rei" is an auspicious wave of energy of the plum blossoms carried by the wind, and "Wa", the general character of peace and tranquility. Accordingly, the name marks the 248th era name designated in Japanese history. While the "wa" character 和 has been used in 19 previous era names, the "rei" character 令 has never appeared before. The character appeared in a proposed era name in 1864—Reitoku —that the ruling Tokugawa shogunate rejected, as it could be interpreted as the emperor commanding the Tokugawa.
Implementation
Currency
According to the Japan Mint, which is responsible for producing Japanese currency, all coins with the new era name will be released by October 2019. It takes three months to make preparations such as creating molds in order to input text or pictures. The Mint will prioritize creating 100- and 500-yen coins due to their high mintage and circulation, with an anticipated release by the end of July 2019.
Technology
Anticipating the coming of the new era, in September 2018, the Unicode Consortium reserved a code point for a new glyph which will combine half-width versions of Reiwa kanji, 令 and 和, into a single character; similar code points exist for earlier era names, including Shōwa and Heisei periods. The resulting new version of Unicode, 12.1.0, was released on 7 May 2019.
Events
Since early 2020, Japan suffered from the COVID-19 pandemic and several countries reported a significant increase in cases by March 2020. Japan and other countries donated masks, medical equipment or money to China. In June 2020, Fugaku was declared the most powerful supercomputer in the world with a performance of 415.53 PFLOPS. Fugaku also ranked first place in computational methods performance for industrial use, artificial intelligence applications, and big data analytics. It was co-developed by the RIKEN research institute and Fujitsu.
Conversion table
To convert any Gregorian calendar year from 2019 to Japanese calendar year in Reiwa era, 2018 needs to be subtracted from the year in question.
