Re: Emacs release schedule and Akihito's abdication

[Paul Eggert]

Van L wrote:
> Are there any memories from 1989 at the last era change in Japan?

That predates Unicode. Although I don't have personal memories of the 
transition, I suspect that back then instead of ㍻ (U+337B SQUARE ERA NAME 
HEISEI) people just wrote the two characters 平成 (U+5E73, U+6210) as both of the 
latter are in JIS X 0208-1983. Most likely a similar substitute will be 
available next year, though we won't know for sure until late February at the 
earliest.

In my limited experience the two-character spelling is ubiquitous even today, 
and the special single character is used mostly in official documents.