New emperor, new era: How a single word defines Japan

I don't know if you have kids, but as soon as they start to ask questions, it becomes clear.

Like why you can't just wear your thong to work? Or nothing at all? Pull at the thread and it comes apart pretty quick. Answers lie more often lie in identity and culture, then they do some kind hard logic.

Obviously Monarchies represent a distinct issue as there's the essential problem of class, but I'd also argue there's something much more than intangible there: so many of the most successful countries have monarchies. Popular ones to boot. Even countries which had powerful socialist leaders (and of course socialism/communism would be utterly opposed to monarchy in theory because that's literally the top of the class system they want to destroy). Sweden, for example is a very socialist country with a monarchy that's more popular than the UK monarchy in the UK.

Of course, you can dump all of that and just use Western time, and mark your birthday in 'days since Jesus was born' ... but I'm not sure how relevant that would be in bucking tradition :)

I also think there is value in the Japanese 'era' system in some ways.

While we see it through the lens of 'Monarchy', maybe we consider just seeing it as 'era' which uses the Monarchy a specific demarcation point.

After all, a new 'era' would have represented entirely new forms of governance, structure, international/feudal relationships. An opportunity to do things like debt forgiveness, heck even build some public works like big libraries or museums, such as happens for each US President.

In many ways, it makes (or perhaps did) make more sense to mark 'eras' in relation to the geopolitical context as it would have in hard dates.

In the grand scheme of history we use the Geological Time Scale [1] (i.e. eras, epochs) as it's quite a bit more convenient that just citing dates.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geologic_time_scale

- Should I be safe in the way that, even in my software doesn't support that unicode version, or my font doesn't have that symbol, I'll at least get a "notdef" or whatever symbol and not break everything? - what if the new name is composed by just one Kanji? Is it getting an unicode symbol anyway? Is it considered a different Kanji?

In many western countries many important traditional skills has been lost by the advent of technology. Either new materials and methods have been employed or many parts has been automated away or outsourced, therefore I love this instance from Japan where they rebuild a wooden temple once every 20 years so that many generations of artisans can work on the project together and pass on the knowledge:

“I saw one elderly person who probably has experienced these events three or four times saying to young people who perhaps participated in the event as children last time, ‘I will leave these duties to you next time,’”