Today is New Year´s day. Yes, it is not that I have lost track of time or something like that. It´s true, according to the Chinese calendar today is New Year´s day. I have had the honour to speak about it during brunch, with Ashley, our Taiwanese friend.
You can seen some traits of the people that are born under the "Tiger" year in this link http://www.springsgreetingcards.com/catalogs/store.asp?pid=250913
Japan has in fact lots of traditions and influences from China. One of them is this concept of the "Year of the Tiger" but in practice, Japanese people don´t start the New Year today but started it on 1st January (according to our "occidental" calendar). I will explain soon how I spent in Japan that day!
I take advantage in this post to share with you something that is also striking for us, the way the Japanese, in their tradition count the number of the year. In official forms we would find numbers like 20, 21, 22.... which initially does not make sense to us, right? However, there is an explanation and it has to do with the number of years that the emperor has been reigning. Now we are under the "Heisei" period, times when the Emperor Akihito is sitting in the throne. One quick way to convert the current year to Heisei is to take the last two digits and add 12 (example, 2010 > 10 + 12 = 22, which means that we are on the Heisei 22nd year!).
You can find more information on this link (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heisei_period).
Greetings!
Marta .
(P.S. I am trying to introduce to terms in Japanese -hiragana, katakana, Kanji- but I haven´t been able today!)
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