How Japan’s new imperial era broke the internet in a very tiny way
https://techcrunch.com/2019/04/02/how-japans-new-imperial-era-broke-the-internet-in-a-very-tiny-way/
Emperor Akihito of Japan is abdicating and passing the office to his son, Crown Prince Naruhito, and as part of the transition comes a new gengo, or era name: “Reiwa.” It’s loaded with meaning and subtext, but because of the way text is sent and displayed over the internet, the name can’t really be displayed properly. Unicode has issued an update making it possible, but for now there’s just no character representing it.
Now, to be clear, you can definitely type out the kanji for it, 令和, and that’s totally fine (though there are some technical hiccups there too). But gengo get combined single characters for certain situations and contexts. For comparison, the current (soon to be former) era, Heisei, can be written 平成 but has a combined-character name as well: ㍻. Sure, it’s just the two pieces squished together, but they’re squished together in an important, official way.