266 CHAPTER 5. COUNTERS AND COUNTING
use are:
”It’s already 10 past 4, are we still going to wait?””That programme will start 5 (minutes) to 1.”But telling time alone isn’t everything. If you don’t want to use
or , you can also say whether you mean in the morning, afternoon,
evening or night, by using the nouns
,
,
and
respectively:
”(I) leave the house every morning at 7.”The prefix , as you may remember from the outline, is a prefix
used to indicate ’every ...’ and is used here to indicate frequent behaviour
rather than just a single event. When you want to specifically refer to ”this”
morning, afternoon, evening or night instead, the words to use are
,
[nothing],
and
respectively. There’s no real reason why there is
no word for ”this afternoon”, but there just isn’t any. Instead,
mean-
ing ”today” is typically used. Also notice the readings for ’this morning’
and ’this night’, which might be different from what you would expect.
If we want to be more specific, we might add a date to the time we’re
stating. The Japanese format for this is ”biggest counter first”, leading to
the format era-year-month-day-(day by name)-hour-minute-second. The
era bit is important here, as the Japanese calendar doesn’t actually corre-
spond to the western calendar. While the Japanese will use the Gregorian
calendar when necessary, the ”proper” Japanese way to count years is to
name the Era to which you’re referring, and then count the number of years
since its epoch. Since these are reasonably important to know, the list of
most recent era – ordered most recent to oldest – is as follows:
The
era is the current Era, which started in 1989 and will last as
long as emperor Akihito remains emperor.The
era was the era before the current era, running from 1926
till 1989