Yes, I have been doing software development in Japan for the past decade.
Of course you are right that no sane person would contemplate this calendar for any purpose other than user-facing display, and even then only where it is absolutely required.
But the insane WTF thing is that it does still seem to be widely required on any kind of financial document. Expense reports, salary statements, that kind of thing. All my banks use this format (and also SJIS text encoding when I download my data (T_T)...)
There are also lots of internal processes^W^W Excel spreadsheets in active use that expect these values so I've seen more than one program that converts 2013 to "H.25"... and it's literally impossible to represent a future date, since we don't know when the emperor might die, even if we have a projected abdication date.
I can't be too smug about it, since I'm American (miles and feet, anybody?) but it is... objectively non-optimal.
Interestingly, sometimes the system is used for future dates. For instance, my drivers license expires in September of H.31, which I guess will never happen now.
It will stay valid. Consider having have to replace millions and millions right after the swap, it will be chaos. The system is simply stupid, not even citizens want it.
Canada isn't much better re: feet, miles. Things are officially metric, but because of proximity to the US and inertia, half of everything is still standard. Buying construction supplies and consumables? All in US units. People talk about square footage of condos, buy carpet in square feet, all fasteners are in US units. But gasoline is sold by the liter. People know how tall they are in feet and inches, not cm. Everything is mixed up together.
Interesting. UK is also weird: food is weighed in metric units, people in imperial; Drinks bought in supermarkets are measured in metric, pubs use imperial (by law in both cases, IIRC); Distances on signs can be meters or miles, both initialised as “m” (context being the only clue); fuel is sold by the litre, fuel efficiency is miles per gallon.
Well there is a tendency to still use Fahrenheit during summer like "it's in the 80s", and "it's in the 90s" this month, but most use Celcius for winters when it gets below freezing. There must be a grey area in the 50s and 60s F. Both approaches often seen in headlines. :)
don't some parts of Europe also use decilitres for beverage packaging? I've seen bottles that are like "75dl", and it took me a few minutes to clue in.
That would be centiliters, for example, wine is most commonly sold in 75cl bottles. Millilitres is also a common unit for smaller quantities in e.g. cosmetics.
I'm in the US and although I spent some time in Canada I am for the most part not used to seeing the metric system used day to day. My metric system knowledge basically is what I remember from elementary and middle school.
but to further confuse things, your height on the driver's license is in cm, not ft-in. and while some imperial units are widely used, I've never heard anyone using yards or gallons, and very rarely miles. I find it rather adorable.
I suppose they like using lbs and sqft as $/lb is smaller and sqft is a bigger number than sqm (and of course the inertia which I prefer calling "being lazy")
It's sad this date system is there for no reason today. Systems never like it and neither do people. I rarely use it and it's mostly bank related but every time I do, I look it up on Google to make sure I remember the number right. This needs to be dropped.
Of course you are right that no sane person would contemplate this calendar for any purpose other than user-facing display, and even then only where it is absolutely required.
But the insane WTF thing is that it does still seem to be widely required on any kind of financial document. Expense reports, salary statements, that kind of thing. All my banks use this format (and also SJIS text encoding when I download my data (T_T)...)
There are also lots of internal processes^W^W Excel spreadsheets in active use that expect these values so I've seen more than one program that converts 2013 to "H.25"... and it's literally impossible to represent a future date, since we don't know when the emperor might die, even if we have a projected abdication date.
I can't be too smug about it, since I'm American (miles and feet, anybody?) but it is... objectively non-optimal.