[tz] Big tech warns of 'Japan's millennium bug' ahead of Akihito's abdication

[Phake Nick]

>
> Unless the new emperor messes things up and chooses a single-character
> name
> that's already in Unicode. (That'll teach these computer whippersnappers
> who's
> boss!...)
>
> I don't envy all the people having to update Japanese calendar or
> text-processing software. And things will be even more hectic if the
> current or
> new emperor dies unexpectedly. Luckily for tzdb, though, Japan does not
> change
> its *clocks* when it gets a new emperor, so we will be off the hook on
> this one.
>
It have already been announced that the new era name will have 2 characters.
Japan specifically asked for a code point in Unicode BMP for legacy
systems. That should make thing easier to most people but also not quite
sustainable due to the limited space in BMP
If era name changes are abrupt due to change of emperor or other reasons,
realistically people would just use old era name until updates are ready.
For tzdb, iirc the era name info is also stored in some notes comment. That
could be updated too.

>
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