Nengo and the future

Monday, June 28, 2010

It has often puzzled me how the nengo calendar system, in its current form which links nengo to the actual rule of a particular emperor, works when it comes to making predictions about the future. This is something any government has to do, but when you are also bound into a system which ties the numbering of years to a specific (highly symbolic and politically and culturally significant) individual lifespan, how does it work.

I've asked, casually and usually over a beer and yakitori, a number of Japanese what they thought -  they assumed there would be some sort of common-sense cut off point where the switch would be made to western style counting. Again, this is interesting; for government documents it seems odd that this - effectively a prediction of the imperial lifespan and an implication of not too distant death - should be left to individual judgements. So, is there an official whose role it is to say when this switch happens? Who effectively predicts the death of the emperor?

Maybe there is somewhere. However, the obvious way to easily avoid such a prediction is to just let the current nengo (Heisei at the time of writing) to extend as far as necessary into the future, despite the fact that any human lifespan - and thus any nengo - is limited.

Anyway, I was recently looking at the 1993 Information Technology City for Fukuoka and I came across the following graph:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/koga-browes/4741061051/in/set-72157624249627341/

It shows a prediction of demographic structure until 2070, or in nengo terms that's Showa 145! The book itself was published in Heisei5 (1993) but the graph is from Showa61 (1986). By the time of publication the Showa nengo had already come to an end, we got a few days of Showa 64 and that was it, Heisei started in January 1989. So, what was the original author doing effectively predicting Hirohito would live to the age of 145, and what was the reproducing author doing ignoring the fact that he'd already died?

Whatever the answer is - maybe its preferable to use a nonsensical prediction about a dead emperor, rather than having to make a rational/common-sense predication about a living one - it seems to show that, despite what one would think - that people are able to make sensible decisions about theses things based on a knowledge of the typical human lifespan - this is not in fact the case and local governments will happily (there are other charts in this document that are similar) predict an emperor living to the age of 169!

Or maybe I'm taking this whole nengo thing too seriously!?