Reiwa
Background. Announcement. The Japanese government on 1 April 2019 announced the name during a live televised press conference, as Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga traditionally revealed the kanji calligraphy on a board. The Prime Minister Shinzō Abe said that "Reiwa" represents "a culture being born and nurtured by people coming together beautifully". Name selection. 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 , , , , and , 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 and . Origin and meaning. The kanji characters for "Reiwa" are derived from the "Man'yōshū", an eighth-century (Nara period) anthology of "waka" poetry. The "kotobagaki" (headnote) attached to a group of 32 poems (815–846) 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 here is translated as "command" or "order" – which are the significantly more common meanings of the character, especially so in both 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. Prior to and naturally irrespective of the era announcement, within the context of the Chinese essay in the "Man'yōshū" from which the excerpt is cited, the expression (which characters  constitute the word "reigetsu" in modern Japanese) has generally been academically translated or interpreted as "wonderful" or "good (Japanese: "yoi") month" in published scholarly works, such as by Alexander Vovin in English as "wonderful month" in his 2011 commentary and translation of Book 5, or by Susumu Nakanishi in Japanese as in his commentary and translation into modern Japanese that was published in 1978. In addition, following the announcement of "Reiwa" in 2019, Susumu Nakanishi advocated for understanding the character of the era name through the help of the Japanese word , stressing that in the traditional dictionaries (such as "Erya  or the Kangxi Dictionary"), the word is explained with the word . Nakanishi criticized the understanding of the Novelty. "Reiwa" marks the first Japanese era name with characters that were taken from Japanese literature instead of classic Chinese literature. 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 has been used in 19 previous era names, the "rei" character 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 ("rei") the "Toku"gawa. On the other hand, according to , professor of Japanese literature, and , 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 : Implementation. Currency. According to the Japan Mint, 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, the Unicode Consortium reserved a code point () in September 2018 for a new glyph which will combine half-width versions of "Reiwa" kanji, and , 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. The Microsoft Windows update KB4469068 included support for the new era. Events. On 19 November 2019, Shinzo Abe became the longest-serving prime minister of Japan and surpassed the previous 2,883-day record of Katsura Tarō. Abe also beat Eisaku Satō's 2,798 consecutive days record on August 23, 2020. He resigned for health reasons in September 2020 and was succeeded by Yoshihide Suga. In early 2020, Japan began to suffer from the  COVID-19 pandemic as several countries reported a significant increase in cases by March 2020. Japan and other countries donated masks, medical equipment, and 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. Despite COVID, the Tokyo Olympics went ahead in the summer of 2021, a year later than originally scheduled. In September 2021, Suga announced he would  not stand in the 2021 Liberal Democratic Party (Japan) leadership election, effectively ending his term as Prime Minister. He was succeeded by Fumio Kishida who took office as the country's new Prime Minister on 4 October 2021. Kishida was elected leader of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) previous week. He was officially confirmed as the country's 100th prime minister following a parliamentary vote. In March 2022, a serious earthquake killed 4, injured hundreds, and damaged the Shinkansen line in Tohoku. Conversion table. To convert any Gregorian calendar year since 2019 to Japanese calendar year in Reiwa era , subtract 2018 from the year in question.