thatthingyoudo

The new era name — announced today by the committee on the first day of the new financial year, just one month before the era officially begins on May 1 — is Reiwa (令 and 和). According to the official explanation, the two characters that comprise the era name “Reiwa” represent an era where people band together to create a better society and are based on a passage from the Manyoshu, the earliest existing anthology of Japanese poetry.