Dates in Japan are usually printed month, day. Or year, month, day.
This is the exact opposite of Australia, which is day, month, year. And different again from America, the most commonly used standard online. So in any given week I am presented with dates in any of the three formats. It wasn't so bad when I had been living in Japan for a solid period of time, but this year I've been moving all over the place and I can't keep them straight any more.
What tips me over into the realm of confusion is that in Japan, the year is sometimes given in 'Japanese era' time. In Japan, they use the usual 1995, 2000, 2010, etc. They also use years that correspond to how long the current emperor has been reigning. Our current era is the Heisei period, which began in 1989, and this year, 2010, is Heisei 22.
The Heisei year isn't used so often. It may be used on special occasions or official documents. I had to use it when applying for a bank account. The roadworks on my street announced its expected end date in Heisei format. Every time I see a date in Heisei format I think 'now is that this year or next year?' I can never remember the Heisei year (I know that's pretty sad, considering it is only one number and only changes once a year).
The not-very-exciting point of this is that today I was cooking some vegetables and I saw the expiry date, 11 3 21. I immediately thought 'it's in Heisei format! Arggh, it expired November 3rd'.
'Hang on, is this year Heisei 21 or 22? I'd better check the Internet!'
'Oh, there's no way they expired last year. Obviously they expire in March next year.'
'Duh, Japanese dates are year-month-day.'
(Those are some long life veggies.)
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That expiry date was horribly confusing. It would have been so much more obvious if the year had been written with four digits, 2011-03-21. YYYY-MM-DD is my favourite date format because it is unambiguous, on account of no-one anywhere in the world using YYYY-DD-MM. It also has the happy side-effect of automatically sorting by date when used in filenames.
ReplyDeleteDown with two-digit years!