Simon Willison’s Weblog

Big tech warns of ’Japan’s millennium bug’ ahead of Akihito’s abdication (via) Emperor Akihito’s abdication in April 2019 triggers a new era, and the Japanese calendar counts years from the coronation of the current emperor. The era hasn’t changed since 1989 and a great deal of software is unable to handle a change. To make things more complicated... the name of the new era will be announced in late February, but it needs to be represented in unicode as a single new character... and the next version of Unicode (v12) is due out in early March. There may have to be a Unicode 12.1 released shortly afterwards that includes the new codepoint.

# 28th July 2018, 2:04 pm / timezones, unicode, japan

The Booming Japanese Rent-a-Friend Business. “In Japan, you can pay an actor to impersonate your relative, spouse, coworker, or any kind of acquaintance.”. Surprisingly poignant interview with a man who runs a company that employs 800 professional actors for almost any conceivable situation.

# 9th November 2017, 3:28 pm / japan