alt Hacker News> While a number of articles cropped up explaining what the Showa Hundred Year Problem was leading up to 2025, they passed mostly unnoticed, mere curiosities compared to the major media attention showered on Y2K a quarter century ago. And, in fact, as 2025 comes to a close, I can't find any reports of actual issues stemming from the date change.
This is probably a combination of two things:
- computer people hate with a passion the Imperial calendar. Normal people are already annoyed when they have to do some calculation, in a decade+ spent here I never ever heard of anyone actively wanting to display or handle dates in the imperial/religious system. The only people I ever saw do it were required to.
- people who care the most about the imperial calendar use mostly paper and static data. It will be for printed forms, official announcements etc. The dynamic part will be mostly for this year or next year, and those will be up to date with the current/next area (also the sanest way to handle that is to have a unix date internally and only convert at display/parsing)
While most developers may dislike the imperial calendar, all of my bank/brokerage statements display dates using it, as do tax/pension forms. It's definitely still in heavy use for some very important data.
On a similar note, I recently requested a list of historical transactions from a brokerage and found that transaction dates continued to be annotated as Heisei all the way through Heisei 36 (2024), a full 5 years after Heisei officially ended in Heisei 31 / Reiwa 1 (2019). Late in 2024, transactions finally started being annotated Reiwa 6.