New Era, New Error? 令和 or 冷和? Japan's Reiwa Epoch.
01 April 2019 [link youtube]
Youtube Automatic Transcription
in the Western world today it was April
1st known as April Fool's Day but in some parts of Asia it was the dawn of a new era and some might say the dawn of a new era instead Japan's new era gets a name but no one can agree on what it means that headline comes from the New York Times so it must be true right in an email to reporters a spokesman for the prime minister's office wrote that interpreting rain law as order and peace was quote/unquote not the intended meaning well the symbol itself etymologically is a little bit menacing and when we talk about etymology in Chinese and I got a digress dimension for some people in the audience here modern Japanese is largely made up of bits and pieces of broken Chinese so it's Chinese for docume when you look at the etymology of a Chinese word you're often looking at a visual symbol rather than a series of phonetic markings and you can kind of squint with one eye and stare at this and kind of sort of make out that the bottom half of the symbol originally was a person kneeling in supplication believe it or not the triangular symbol at the top of the character indicates a mouth presumably he removing an order rahmel giving a command so there's a sense of an order or a command a decree obedience and some people regard this I don't know a little bit a little bit menacing is the name for the new era in in Japanese marking a new emperor taking over the throne but as I pointed out here at the bottom of the screen in context it can also just mean the season summer winter that sort of thing and apparently it was just a poetic sense of the start of a new season that was the intended meaning but you know the intended meaning is not necessarily the only one that matters here so leaving aside the New York Times let's go to a much more reliable source information people chatting about this on Twitter the name of Japan's new Imperial air which comes as Emperor Akihito prepares to abdicate has been revealed as raela Prime Minister a Bey is set to explain how the government arrived at this name but the characters mean command / order and peace so again you know does it really mean command order and look that the second half of the word in modern Chinese just means and a nd is is the most common use of it it's a conjunction in the middle of of many many sentences one of the first characters you learn well under standard perspective but we continue she balked at this character but it does come from a poem in ancient Japanese and in that poem in context it's describing the scent of plum blossoms travelling with the wind in early spring summer replies I don't feel good about this character the poem feels out of place in the current situation and these two symbols put together it looks cold to me so this to me is actually I mean it's it's stated here really briefly but this is actually a much more interesting and subversive sort of complaint and this person is replied to the same comment on Twitter and so the issue is not the meaning of the characters as correctly written but if you add just two small lines to the left this is the much more commonly seen character in both Chinese and Japanese meaning cold and then guess what it problem isn't just cold but when you put these characters together you get lung huh and this doesn't just mean cold Pease as in the opposite of cold war but it now has a really ominous political meaning especially when it's describing a current era in Japanese politics so that seems to have been a possibility that the Japanese government didn't consider or didn't take seriously the association between these two characters that are not identical but one is going to remind the reader of the other and one is more commonly using the other so I don't know at the very least this is an unfortunate coincidence Hannah Gould comments was to understand the poetic etymology that it's not really the etymology oh well she means well well Sanderson the poetic and emoji it seems odd that the government would pick the term given it's more familiar bureaucratic if not authoritarian overtones so mmm that she's mixed up which side is the etymology the poetry is the context they are pulling it from where it just means the season the etymology of looking at the character in isolation is what has the authoritarian overtones but look the fact that these people are confused the fact that the authors of the New York Times are confused means there's something confusing that means this line here to be confused about so probably a poor choice all right so this symbol comes from yeah the name of the season month of good fortune in the first stance of the poem and it translates to the early spring of good fortune don't try to attach a context to it that simply isn't there again I sympathize but the problem is on the one hand looking at the character in isolation without the context and then secondly this resemblance to the close similarity to the other character meaning cold and that has a uniquely awful meaning when it's combined in this particular way in a political context so interesting games we play doesn't the collection of poetry translate this term as good or excellent and harmony I'm happy to go with excellent harmony rather than peace through order so I highlighted that because I thought that was a really interesting example of kind of over interpreting the two characters taking them apart and putting them back together again and reading it as peace through order but anyway this is April Fool's Day April 1st 2019 and all around the world people who speak Japanese people who speak Chinese and people who don't know either one are puzzling over the symbolic and political significance of Japan declaring the dawn of the new era [Music]
1st known as April Fool's Day but in some parts of Asia it was the dawn of a new era and some might say the dawn of a new era instead Japan's new era gets a name but no one can agree on what it means that headline comes from the New York Times so it must be true right in an email to reporters a spokesman for the prime minister's office wrote that interpreting rain law as order and peace was quote/unquote not the intended meaning well the symbol itself etymologically is a little bit menacing and when we talk about etymology in Chinese and I got a digress dimension for some people in the audience here modern Japanese is largely made up of bits and pieces of broken Chinese so it's Chinese for docume when you look at the etymology of a Chinese word you're often looking at a visual symbol rather than a series of phonetic markings and you can kind of squint with one eye and stare at this and kind of sort of make out that the bottom half of the symbol originally was a person kneeling in supplication believe it or not the triangular symbol at the top of the character indicates a mouth presumably he removing an order rahmel giving a command so there's a sense of an order or a command a decree obedience and some people regard this I don't know a little bit a little bit menacing is the name for the new era in in Japanese marking a new emperor taking over the throne but as I pointed out here at the bottom of the screen in context it can also just mean the season summer winter that sort of thing and apparently it was just a poetic sense of the start of a new season that was the intended meaning but you know the intended meaning is not necessarily the only one that matters here so leaving aside the New York Times let's go to a much more reliable source information people chatting about this on Twitter the name of Japan's new Imperial air which comes as Emperor Akihito prepares to abdicate has been revealed as raela Prime Minister a Bey is set to explain how the government arrived at this name but the characters mean command / order and peace so again you know does it really mean command order and look that the second half of the word in modern Chinese just means and a nd is is the most common use of it it's a conjunction in the middle of of many many sentences one of the first characters you learn well under standard perspective but we continue she balked at this character but it does come from a poem in ancient Japanese and in that poem in context it's describing the scent of plum blossoms travelling with the wind in early spring summer replies I don't feel good about this character the poem feels out of place in the current situation and these two symbols put together it looks cold to me so this to me is actually I mean it's it's stated here really briefly but this is actually a much more interesting and subversive sort of complaint and this person is replied to the same comment on Twitter and so the issue is not the meaning of the characters as correctly written but if you add just two small lines to the left this is the much more commonly seen character in both Chinese and Japanese meaning cold and then guess what it problem isn't just cold but when you put these characters together you get lung huh and this doesn't just mean cold Pease as in the opposite of cold war but it now has a really ominous political meaning especially when it's describing a current era in Japanese politics so that seems to have been a possibility that the Japanese government didn't consider or didn't take seriously the association between these two characters that are not identical but one is going to remind the reader of the other and one is more commonly using the other so I don't know at the very least this is an unfortunate coincidence Hannah Gould comments was to understand the poetic etymology that it's not really the etymology oh well she means well well Sanderson the poetic and emoji it seems odd that the government would pick the term given it's more familiar bureaucratic if not authoritarian overtones so mmm that she's mixed up which side is the etymology the poetry is the context they are pulling it from where it just means the season the etymology of looking at the character in isolation is what has the authoritarian overtones but look the fact that these people are confused the fact that the authors of the New York Times are confused means there's something confusing that means this line here to be confused about so probably a poor choice all right so this symbol comes from yeah the name of the season month of good fortune in the first stance of the poem and it translates to the early spring of good fortune don't try to attach a context to it that simply isn't there again I sympathize but the problem is on the one hand looking at the character in isolation without the context and then secondly this resemblance to the close similarity to the other character meaning cold and that has a uniquely awful meaning when it's combined in this particular way in a political context so interesting games we play doesn't the collection of poetry translate this term as good or excellent and harmony I'm happy to go with excellent harmony rather than peace through order so I highlighted that because I thought that was a really interesting example of kind of over interpreting the two characters taking them apart and putting them back together again and reading it as peace through order but anyway this is April Fool's Day April 1st 2019 and all around the world people who speak Japanese people who speak Chinese and people who don't know either one are puzzling over the symbolic and political significance of Japan declaring the dawn of the new era [Music]