{"id":13045,"date":"2018-10-04T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2018-10-04T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.globalizationpartners.com\/2018\/10\/04\/news-new-era-for-the-japanese-calendar\/"},"modified":"2021-03-08T15:02:23","modified_gmt":"2021-03-08T15:02:23","slug":"news-new-era-for-the-japanese-calendar","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.globalizationpartners.com\/2018\/10\/04\/news-new-era-for-the-japanese-calendar\/","title":{"rendered":"News: New Era for the Japanese Calendar"},"content":{"rendered":"

In May 2019, a new era of the Japanese calendar is expected to be announced. The new era will be represented in dates by two names. One name will consist of a sequence of two existing kanji and the other of a new single Japanese character that combines those two.<\/p>\n

The current Heisei era has been in place since 1989. Because the current era began during the development of the modern computer systems, most software systems are not prepared for a new era. Consequently, most software used in Japan will need to adopt the new era name and add font support for the new character.<\/p>\n

The exact date of the new era name announcement is unknown and there will likely be a small timeframe for implementing the new era information, possibly less than a month, which will create major challenges to the IT industry.<\/p>\n

An article in the Unicode blog<\/a>, highlights the below actions that the Unicode Consortium has taken to prepare:<\/p>\n