I got an answer from:
Lunar Calendar, Kanji and the impact to modernization of Japan.? - Yahoo! Answers
Quote:
Calendar won't be a goal in any countries. This is "if" story, but if China had the world in the future like the Yuan, China would shift the calender to their local calender.
Calender is just a medium or measure. In the post war time, the calender in Japan have been modified several times. Japanese government have changed some celebration days, like Coming-of-Age Day, Sport day, The day of sea, Emperor's birthday, etc. The last revision was in 2005 (if I am right).
Think about the time of 150 years ago. When ppl in the world trade or do business together, calculating the gap between Lunar Calendars in Asia and Solar calenders was not that easy. I guess the calculation even between Japanese Luna calender and Gregorian calendar was not easy. (Don't mix Japanese Luna calender and Chinese Luna calender. Chinese Luna calender followed agricultural seasons and the the New Year day shifted every year, eg. CNY in 2008 was Feb 7, Feb 18 in 2007 and Jan 29 in 2006 in modern calender. Japanese Luna calender was Lunisolar calendar and divided a year in 24. New year day didn't shift basically.)
The mixture of Kanji (ideogram+sound) and Kana (Hiragana and Katakana, phonograms) had worked very well in the Meiji era (the mixture didn't always happen through out the history). Chinese character (Traditional one) is great invention, we can get both meaning and the sound from each character. This is better than Roman alphabet (phonogram).
However, unfortunately, Mao's China changed the characters to Simple Chinese after 1950's. Many characters lost its original meanings. eg. Love 愛 lost heart 心 (now it is 爱 in China), we can't open 開 the gate cos there is no gate (it is 开 in China), when ppl shop 買 or 賣, nobody pays money 貝, shell was a money in ancient time ( it is 买 in China), etc.
Tough to explain this in English. Kanji or Chinese characters hold many meanings in it, but there are not the same meanings in English words. If you could read Japanese or Chinese documents, a lot of your questions would be solved.
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This is my answer:
I admire Japanese culture but I couldn’t agree with Joriental’s answer. It too sentimental.
Are you sure that before Meji Era, New year day didn't shift basically? I checked on the website “Nengo calculation”:
http://www.uni-tuebingen.de/geschichte-j...
and found:
New year day of the first year of Keio (1865) is Jan 27.
New year day of the second year of Keio (1866) is Feb 15.
New year day of the third year of Keio (1867) is Feb 5.
New year day of the fourth year of Keio (1868) is Jan 25.
And I also found that there was no different between Japanese and Vietnamese Lunar New Year at that time. You said the Traditional Japanese year are divided into 24. That is the same in Vietnamese "Tiết khí" (二十四節気
) and I know it is "sekki" in Japanese and "solar terms" in English.
But from the date of the in invasion of French upon Vietnam (1858) upto now, Vietnam use both Calendars, and nobody complained about the complicated of calendars (except me). No body found it difficult to go on business with Westerner.
I agree that the simplified Chinese Character looks very ugly. But I think Japanese Shinjitai Kanji is somewhere between Traditional and Simplified Chinese. What do you think of 体體 , 来 來, 学 學 in Japanese? Any way I think Japanese Kanji is OK (as I said that I accept all the differencies in culture), although sometimes I could not find some Japanese Characters in my Dictionary.
For example: The Kanji 縄 for Jomon culture. It makes me difficult to find that it is 繩 in traditional Chinese and understand what Jomon means.
On the other hand, a lot of Chinese (such as 味 清) are not idiogram. They are installed from other characters with similar sounds (of course in Chinese, not Japanese). And you can not explain it if you use Kun Yomi. That means those characters have no relation with Japanese culture but Chinese culture.
And I don't think that when you know there area shell in the character "buy" and "sell", it will help you in moderinization.
As for most Vietnamese (for example), Chinese Characters mean nothing. Latin alphabet is OK, we only write down what we want to say. We can understand what they say. That means we can understand what theyt write. It takes Vietnamese only 3 to 6 months to learn to read and write. We don’t have to learn Chinese Characters. We only learn Chinese when we like to. When we learn English, it makes us very easy to write. I can write as fast as I think. Maybe I have some mistakes but the writing doesn’t obstruct my thinking.
I wonder why Meji didn’t use Romaji for Japanese at that time. It would cut down the burden on Education and it makes people easy to learn Western languages very easy for Japanese modernization. And Japanese didn’t need to use English instead of Japanese as recommendation of Arinori Mori.