Westernization

With the Imperial era name change, Japan's Foreign Ministry is considering scrapping the use of the era name for calendar years in some of its official documents and switching to the Gregorian calendar, according to sources.

While the ministry will keep using the Japanese era calendar in documents that require consistency with papers of other ministries (including those that are budget-related), it plans to promote the use of the Gregorian calendar for documents without such restrictions.

Recently, a senior Foreign Ministry official said use of the Japanese era calendar may be confusing to other countries. Foreign Minister Taro Kono also pointed to the complexity of calculations needed when converting years between the two era systems. “We’ll make efforts so that there’ll be no mistakes when we go back and forth between the Christian and Japanese era systems,” he added.