Japanese Era Date Converter

The wareki counts years from the accession of the reigning emperor rather than from a fixed epoch. Each reign has a name - currently Reiwa (令和), before that Heisei (平成), Shōwa (昭和), Taishō (大正) and Meiji (明治) - and the year restarts at 1 when a new emperor takes the throne. It has never been replaced because it is embedded in law and administration: it is the standard form on official documents, so government systems, contracts, court records and land registries all express dates in it. In everyday life the two systems coexist - a Japanese person will often know their birth year in both.

Reiwa year + 2018 gives the Western year for any date from 1 May onward - Reiwa 8 is 2026. But before 1 May 2019 that arithmetic is wrong, because Reiwa did not exist yet: Reiwa began on 1 May 2019, and January to April of 2019 is still Heisei 31. That is the whole reason to use a converter rather than the mental shortcut. The same applies to the other eras: Heisei year + 1988, Shōwa year + 1925, Taishō year + 1911, Meiji year + 1867 - each correct except across its own transition.

Meiji ran from 25 January 1868 to 29 July 1912. Taishō from 30 July 1912 to 24 December 1926. Shōwa from 25 December 1926 to 7 January 1989 - the longest reign in Japanese history at 62 years. Heisei from 8 January 1989 to 30 April 2019. Reiwa began on 1 May 2019 and is current. Four of those five transitions took effect on the day the previous emperor died; Heisei is the exception, beginning the day after Emperor Shōwa's death under the Era Name Act. Reiwa is different again: Emperor Akihito abdicated rather than died, so the date was known years in advance.

Yes - switch to the bulk tab and paste a column straight out of a spreadsheet, one date per line. The formats can be mixed in any combination, which is the usual state of a real dataset: 令和6年4月1日, 令和六年四月一日 in kanji numerals, R6.4.1, ㋿6/4/1 using the single-character era ligature, 平成31年3月1日, 2019/5/1, ２０１９年５月１日 in full-width digits, and 2019-05-01 are all understood. A trailing weekday marker like （月）is ignored. Everything converts to whichever output format you pick and exports as a CSV you can paste back into the sheet, with impossible dates flagged in a status column rather than silently corrected.

It is the era abbreviated to its initial letter, which is how dates are printed in narrow form fields and on things like driving licences. R is Reiwa, H is Heisei, S is Shōwa, T is Taishō and M is Meiji, followed by the era year and then month and day - so R6.04.01 is 1 April 2024 and S45.12.03 is 3 December 1970. Japanese forms often print all five letters with a circle to draw around the right one. You will also see the single Unicode characters ㋿ ㍻ ㍼ ㍽ ㍾, which are the whole era name compressed into one square; this converter accepts all of these.

Only with an important caveat, which the tool shows you when you cross that line. Japan used a lunisolar calendar until 明治5年12月3日, which was redesignated 明治6年1月1日 - 1 January 1873. The days in between simply never happened. For any earlier date the era and year still line up, but the month and day do not correspond to Gregorian months and days at all, because they were counted on a different kind of calendar with occasional intercalary months. So 明治3年5月10日 in an old family register is not 10 May 1870. If you are doing genealogy or archival research before 1873, you need a proper lunisolar conversion table, and the tool says so rather than quietly producing a plausible-looking wrong answer.

Free, unlimited, no signup, and nothing is transmitted. The five era boundaries are a handful of dates held in the page itself, so the conversion is arithmetic done on your own device - which also means the tool keeps working if you lose your connection after the page has loaded, and that a bulk list of thousands of dates converts instantly rather than being rate-limited by an API.